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INITIAL STUDIES 



AMERICAN LETTERS 



BY 



HENRY A. BEERS 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN YALE UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK CLEVELAND Chicago 
^l)C erijatauqua Bit00 



1 
/ 



39544^ 

Copyright, 1895, i8c 
By flood and VINCENT 



WO COPIES HSCSIVED, 




The Lakeside Press, Chicago, III., U. S. A, 
R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company 






PREFACE. 

This volume, originally published in 1887 as **An Out- 
line Sketch of American Literature,") and reissued under 
the present title in 1891, with an appendix consisting of 
selections from representative American writers, is in- 
tended as a companion to the historical sketch of English 
literature, entitled "From Chaucer to Tennyson," pub- 
lished in 1886 (revised edition 1890), for the Chautauqua 
Circle. It has now (1895) been a second time revised and 
supplied with marginal catch-words for convenient refer- 
ence. I have also added a few paragraphs to the final 
chapter, to bring the subject up to date. In writing it 
I have followed the same plan, aiming to present the sub- 
ject in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the form of 
a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not under- 
taken to describe, or even to mention,* every American 
author or book of Importance, but only those which 
seemed to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe 
that the sketch contains enough detail to make it of some 
use as a guide-book to our literature. Though meant to be 
mainly a history of American belles-lettres^ it makes some 
mention of historical and political writings, but hardly 
any of philosophical, scientific, and technical works. 

A chronological rather than a topical order has been fol- 
lowed, although the fact that our best literature is of recent 
growth has made it impossible to adhere as closely to a 
chronological plan as in the English sketch. In the read- 
ing courses appended to the different chapters I have 
named a few of the most important authorities in American 

iii 



Preface, 



literary history, such as Duj^ckincls, Tyler, Stedman, and 
Richardson. My thanks are due to the authors and pub- 
lishers who have kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted 
matter for the appendix ; especially to Mr. Park Godwin 
and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the passages from 
Bryant ; to Messrs. A. C. Armstrong & Son for the selec- 
tions from Poe ; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. 
Roberts Brothers for the extract from "The Man Without a 
Country "; to the late Walt Whitman for his two poems ; 
and to Mr. Clemens and the American Publishing Co. for 
the passage from " The Jumping Frog." 

Henry A. Beers. 



/2 *• 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER. PAGE. 

I. The Colonial Period, 1307-1765 7 

II. The Kevolutionary Period, 1765-1815 ...... 42 

TIL The Era OF National Expansion, 1815-1837. 69 

IV. The Concord Writers, 1837-1861 95 

V. The Cambridge Scholars, 1837-1861 125 

VI. Literature in the Cities, 1837-1861. .... — 156 

VIL Literature Since 1861 189 

Appendix 225 



INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN 
LETTERS. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Colonial Period— 1607-1765. 

The writings of our colonial era have a much greater 
importance as history than as literature. It would be un- 
fair to judge of tlie intellectual vigor of the English colo- 
nists in America by the books that they wrote ; those 
" stern men with empires in their brains " had more press- 
ing work to do than the making of books. The first set- 
tlers, indeed, were brought face to face with strange and 
exciting conditions — the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, 
the flora and fauna of a new w^orld, — things which seem 
stimulating to the imagination, and incidents and experi- 
ences which might have lent themselves easily to poetry 
or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England re- 
ports which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, 
upon the whole, hardly rise into the region of literature. 
"New England," said Hawthorne, "was then in a state 
incomparably more picturesque than at present." But to 
a contemporary that old New England of the seventeenth 
century doubtless seemed anything but picturesque ; filled, 
on the contrary, with grim, hard, work-day realities. The 
planters both of Virginia and Massachusetts were deci- 
mated by sickness and starvation, constantly threatened 
by Indian wars, and troubled by quarrels among them- 
selves and fears of disturbance from England. The 

7 



Initial Studies in American Letters. 



wrangles between the royal governors and the house of 
burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the theological squab- 
bles in New England, which fill our colonial records, are 
petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be 
so did we not bear in mind to what imperial destinies 
these conflicts were slowly educating the little communi- 
ties which had hardly yet secured a foothold on the edge of 
the raw continent. 

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and 
Plymouth settlements, when the American plantations had 
grown strong and flourishing, and commerce was build- 
ing up large towns, and there were wealth and generous 
living and fine society, the " good old colony days when 
we lived under the king '' had yielded little in the way of 
literature that is of any permanent interest. There would 
seem to be something in the relation of a colony to the 
mother-country w^hich dooms the thought and art of the 
former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia 
are great iDrovinces, wealthier and more populous than the 
thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from Eng- 
land. They have cities whose inhabitants number hun- 
dreds of thousands, well-equipped universities, libraries, 
cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the outward appli- 
ances of an advanced civilization ; and yet what have 
Canada and Australia contributed to British literature ? 

American literature had no infancy. That engaging 
naivete and that heroic rudeness Avhich give a charm to 
the early popular tales and songs of Europe find, of course, 
no counterpart on our soil. Instead of emerging from the 
twilight of the past, the first American writings were pro- 
duced under the garish noon of a modern and learned 
age. Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of 
a colonial literature. The poets, in particular, instead of 
finding a challenge to their imagination in the new life 






The Colonial Period. 9 

about them, are apt to go on imitating tlie cast-off literary- 
fashions of the mother-country. America was settled by 
Englislimen wlio were contemporary witli the greatest 
names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 
1607, nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero 
of that enterprise. Captain John Smith, may not improba- 
bly have been a personal acquaintance of the great drama- 
tist. " They have acted my fatal tragedies on the stage," 
wrote Smith. Many circumstances in "The Tempest" 
were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the Sea Ven- 
ture on '' the still vext Bermoothes," as described by 
William Strachey in his " True Reportory of the Wrack 
and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates," written at James- 
town, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's 
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the *' Polyol- 
bion," addressed a spirited valedictory ode to the three 
shiploads of " brave, heroic minds" who sailed from Lon- 
don in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode which ended with 
the prophecy of a future American literature : 

" And as there plenty grows 
Of laurel everywhere — 
Apollo's sacred tree — 
You it may see 
A poet's brows 
To crown, that may sing there." 

Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the 
" Civil Wars," had also prophesied in a similar strain : 

" And who in time knows whither we may vent 
The treasure of our tongue to what strange shores . . .. 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
May come refined with accents that are ours ?" 

It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, 
and Walter Raleigh might have been reckoned among the 
poets of America. He was one of the original promoters of 
the Virginia colony, and he made voyages in person to 



10 Initial Studies m American Letters, 

Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things 
have happened than that when John Milton left 
Cambridge in 1632 he should have been tempted to follow 
Winthrop and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who 
had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane, the younger, 
who was afterward Milton's friend — 

"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old "— 
came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of 
Massachusetts. These are idle speculations, and yet, when 
we reflect that Oliver Cromwell was on the point of em- 
barking for America when he was prevented by the king's 
officers, we may, for the nonce, " let our frail thoughts 
dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a 
chance " Paradise Lost " missed being written in Boston. 
But, as a rule, the members of the literary guild are not 
quick to emigrate. They like the feeling of an old and 
rich civilization about them, a state of society which 
America has only begun to reach during the present cen- 
tury. 

Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two 
great distributing centers of the English race." The men 
who colonized the country between the capes of Vir- 
ginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from the literary 
or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first 
settlers were gentlemen — too many. Captain Smith thought, 
for the good of the plantation. Some among these were 
men of worth and spirit, " of good means and great parent- 
age." Such was, for example, George Percy, a younger 
brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of 
the original adventurers, and the author of **A Discourse 
of the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia," 
which contains a graphic narrative of the fever and fam- 
ine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But many of these 
gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither 



The Colonial Period. 11 

by their friends to escape ill destinies " ; dissipated younger 
sons, soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold 
which was supposed to abound in the new country, and 
who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking at the 
tavern, as soon as there was any tavern. With these was 
a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, 
and the offscourings of the London streets, fruit of press- 
gangs and jail deliveries, sent over to " work in the plan- 
tations." 

Nor w^ere the conditions of life afterward in Virginia 
very favorable to literary growth. The planters lived iso- 
lated on great estates which had water-fronts on the rivers 
that flow into the Chesapeake. There the tobacco, the 
chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon the 
trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of 
the jDlantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited 
occasionally by a distant neighbor, the Virginia country 
gentleman lived a free and careless life. He was fond of 
fox-hunting, horse-racing, and cock-fighting. There were no 
large towns, and the planters met each other mainly on oc- 
casion of a county court or the assembling of the burgesses. 
The courthouse was the nucleus of social and political life 
in Virginia, as the town-meeting w^as in New England. In 
such a state of society schools were necessarily few, and 
popular education did not exist. Sir William Berkeley, 
who was the royal governor of the colony from 1641 to 
1677, said in 1670, " I thank God there are no free schools 
nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred 
years." In the matter of printing this pious wish was 
well-nigh realized. The first press set up in the colony, 
about 1681, was soon suppressed, and found no successor 
until the year 1729. From that date until some ten years 
before the Revolution one printing-press answered the 
needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. The 



12 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

earliest newspaper in the colony was the Virginia Gazette, 
established in 1736. 

In the absence of schools the higher education naturally 
languished. Some of the planters were taught at home by 
tutors, and others went to England and entered the univer- 
sities. But these were few in number, and there was no 
college in the colony until more than half a century after 
the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of 
Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was 
established at Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the 
Rev. James Blair, a Scotch divine, who was sent by the 
Bishop of London as " commissary " to the church in Vir- 
ginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held its 
first commencement in 1700, It is perhaps significant of 
the difference between the Puritans of New England and 
the so-called "Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the 
former founded and supported Harvard College in 1636, 
and Yale in 1701, of their own motion and at their own 
expense, William and Mary received its endowment from 
the .crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands 
and in part by a tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco ex- 
ported from the colony. In return for this royal grant the 
college was to present yearly to the king two copies of 
Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian gentle- 
men who resorted to the new college that the}'' brought 
their plantation manners with them, and were accustomed 
to " keep race-horses at the college, and bet at the billiard 
or other gaming-tables." William and Mary College did 
a good work for the colony, and educated some of the great 
Virginians of the revolutionary era, but it has never been a 
large or flourishing institution, and has held no such rela- 
tion to the intellectual development of its section as Har- 
vard and Yale have held in the colonies of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut. Even after the foundation of the Uni- 






The Colonial Period. 13 

versity of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a conspicuous 
part, southern youtlis were commonly sent to the North 
for their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the 
Civil War there was a large contingent of southern students 
in several northern colleges, notably in Princeton and 
Yale. 

Naturally, the first books written in America were de- 
scriptions of the country and narratives of the vicissitudes 
of the infant settlements, which were sent home to be 
printed for the information of the English public and the 
encouragement of further immigration. Among books of 
this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most note- 
worthy were the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, 
Captain John Smith. The first of these was his " True 
Relation," namely, " of such occurrences and accidents of 
note as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting 
of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among 
Smith's other books the most important is perhaps his 
" General History of Virginia " (London, 1624), a compila- 
tion of various narratives by different hands, but passing 
under his name. Smith was a man of a restless and daring 
spirit, full of resource, impatient of contradiction, and of a 
somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite for the 
marvelous and a disposition to draw the long-bow. He 
had seen service in many parts of the world, and his won- 
derful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It was 
alleged against him that the evidence of his prowess rested 
almost entirely on his own testimony. His truthfulness 
in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully im- 
pugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embel- 
lishments with which he has colored them ; and, in partic- 
ular, the charming story of Pocahontas saving his life at 
the risk of her own— the one romance of early Virginian 
history — has passed into the realm of legend. 



14 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart 
from the interest of the events which they describe and the 
diverting but forcible personality which they unconsciously 
display. They are the rough-hewn records of a busy man 
of action, whose sword was mightier than his pen. As 
Smith returned to England after two years in Virginia, 
and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settle- 
ment of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, 
he can hardly be claimed as an American author. No 
more can Mr. George Sandys, who came to Virginia in the 
train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his excel- 
lent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the 
James, in the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, 
"limned," as he writes, "by that imperfect light which 
was snatched from the hours of night and repose, having 
wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the muses." 
Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as 
1725, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first 
American poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the 
"Metamorphoses," than he can be reckoned the earliest 
Yankee inventor because he "introduced the first water- 
mill into America." 

The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern 
colonies which took their point of departure from Virginia, 
is almost wholly of this historical and descriptive kind. A 
great part of it is concerned with the internal affairs of the 
province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in 1676, one of the 
most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary annals, 
and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of 
them anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript 
condition a hundred years after the event. Another part is 
concerned with the explorations of new territory. Such 
were the " Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel William 
Byrd, who Avas appointed in 1729 one of the commission- 



The Colonial Period. 15 

ers to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Caro- 
lina, and gave an account of the survey in his " History of 
the Dividing Line," which was printed only in 1841. 
Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of colonial 
Virginia, and a tj^pe of the Old Virginia gentleman. He 
had been sent to England for his education, where he was 
admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow 
of the Royal Society, and formed an intimate friendship 
with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery. He held many 
offices in the government of the colony, and founded 
the cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were 
large, and at Westover — where he had one of the finest 
private libraries in America — he exercised a baronial hos- 
pitality, blending the usual profusion of plantation life 
with the elegance of a traveled scholar and *' picked man 
of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in 
literature. His " History of the Dividing Line " is written 
with a jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, 
and which gives to the painful journey through the wilder- 
ness the air of a holiday expedition. Similar in tone were 
were his diaries of "A Progress to the Mines " and "A 
Journey to the Land of Eden " in North Carolina. 

The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Bev- 
erly, "a native and inhabitant of the place," whose 
"History of Virginia " was printed at London in 1705. 
Beverly w^as a rich planter and large slave-owner, who, 
being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the 
manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's " British 
Empire in America." Beverly was set upon writing 
his history by the inaccuracies of this, and likewise 
because the province "has been so misrepresented to 
the common people of England as to make them believe 
that the servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and 
plow, and that the country turns all people black "—an 



16 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

impression wliich lingers still in parts of Europe. The 
most original portions of the book are those in which the 
author puts down his personal observations of the plants 
and animals of the New World ; and particularly the ac- 
count of the Indians, to which his third book is devoted, 
and which is accompanied by valuable plates. Beverly's 
knowledge of these matters was evidently at first hand, 
and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting. 
The more strictly historical part of his work is not free 
from prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed, 
and impartial, but much less readable, work was William 
Stith's '* History of the First Discovery and Settlement of 
Virginia," 1747, which brought the subject down only to 
the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a 
professor in William and Mary College. 

The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. 
The Church of England was established by law, and non- 
conformity was persecuted in various wa^^s. Three mis- 
sionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by the Puritans of 
New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one 
from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but 
many resorted to them in private houses, until, being 
finally driven out by fines and imprisonments, they took 
refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy were 
not, as a body, very much of a force in education or litera- 
ture. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dis- 
persed condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chap- 
lains with the wealthier planters and partook of their illit- 
eracy and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few of 
them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whitaker, the "Apostle 
of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to the colo- 
nists and convert the Indians, and who published in further- 
ance of those ends "Good News from Virginia," in 1613, 
three years before his death by drowning in the James River. 



The Colonial Period. 17 

The conditions were much more favorable for the produc- 
tion of a literature in New England than in the southern 
colonies. The free and genial existence of the " Old 
Dominion" had no counterpart among the settlers of 
Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must 
have been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons 
of a different way of thinking. But their intensity of 
character, their respect for learning, and the heroic mood 
which sustained them through the hardships and dangers 
of their great enterprise are amply reflected in their own 
writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw 
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate 
in finding interpreters among their descendants, and no 
modern Virginian has done for the memory of the James- 
town planters what Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, 
and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and 
romance over the lives of the founders of New England. 

Cotton Mather, in his "Magnaha," quotes the following 
passage from one of those election sermons, delivered be- 
fore the General Court of Massachusetts, which formed for 
many years the great annual intellectual event of the 
colony : " The question was often put unto our predeces- 
sors, What zvent ye out into the wilderness to see f And the 
answer to it is not only too excellent but too notorious to 
be dissembled. . . . We came hither because we would 
have our posterity settled under the pure and full dispensa- 
tions of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of 
ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, 
theocracies. Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen 
whose zeal for the faith was no whit inferior to that of the 
ministers themselves. Church and state were one. The 
freeman's oath was only administered to church members, 
and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers 
or dissenters. The Pilgrim fathers regarded their trans- 



18 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

plantation to the Kew World as an exile, and nothing is 
more touching in their written records than the repeated 
expressions of love and longing toward the old home 
which they had left, and even toward that Church of 
England from which they had sorrowfully separated them- 
selves. It was not in any light or adventurous spirit that 
they faced the perils of the sea and the wilderness. " This 
howling wilderness," "these ends of the earth," "these 
goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which 
they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Never- 
theless they had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and 
Percy and Sandys, the early historians and writers of New 
England cast in their lots permanently with the new 
settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640 — Mather 
says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first 
"classis" or immigration were among them — when the 
victory of the Puritanic party in Parliament opened a 
career for them in England, and made their presence there 
seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, 
for example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chap- 
lain, and was beheaded after the Restoration, went back in 
1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, the minister of Ipswich, 
Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book against tolera- 
tion, entitled "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," written 
in America and published shortly after its author's arrival 
in England. The civil war, too, put a stop to further emi- 
gration from England until after the Restoration in 1660. 

The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men 
of the middle class, artisans and husbandmen, the most 
useful members of a new colony. But their leaders were 
clergymen educated at the universities, and especially at 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan college ; 
their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of 
education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who 



The Colonial Period. 19 

was learned in law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor 
of Kew Haven, who was a London merchant of good 
estate. It is comi)uted that there were in New England 
during the first generation as many university graduates as 
in any comnmnity of equal population in the old country. 
Almost the first care of the settlers was to establish 
schools. Every town of fifty families was required by law 
to maintain a common school, and every town of a hun- 
dred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only 
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth 
Rock, Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose 
name was thereupon changed to Cambridge, the General 
Court held at Boston on September 8, 1630, having already 
advanced £400 "by way of essay towards the building of 
something to begin a college." "An university," says 
Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the 
good literature there cultivated, sal Gentium, . . . and 
a river without the streams whereof these regions would 
have been mere un watered places for the devil." By 1701 
Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale College, at 
New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut 
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college 
at their own doors. A printing-press was set up at Cam- 
bridge in 1639, which was under the oversight of the 
university authorities, and afterward of licensers appointed 
by the civil power. The press was no more free in Massa- 
chusetts than in Virginia, and that " libertj^ of unlicensed 
printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his 
" Arcopagitica," in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New 
England until some twenty years before the outbreak of 
the Revolutionary War. "The Freeman's Oath" and an 
almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in 1639, and 
in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a 
collection of the psalms in meter^ made by various minis- 



20 Initial Studies in Ameincan Letters. 

ters, and known as "The Bay Psalm Book." The poetry 
of this version was worse, if possible, tlian that of Stern- 
hold and Hopkins's famous rendering ; but it is note- 
worthy that one of the principal translators was that 
devoted "Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, 
who, in 1661-63, translated the Bible into the Algonquin 
tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled a lifetime for the con- 
version of those "salvages," "tawnies," "devil-worship- 
ers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but 
bad words. They have been destroyed instead of con- 
verted ; but his (so entitled) ^^Mwnusse Wunneetupana- 
tamwe Up-Biblum, God naneeswe Nukkone Testament hah 
zvonk Wusku Testament ''^ — the first Bible printed in 
America — remains a monument of missionary zeal and a 
work of great value to students of the Indian languages. 

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on 
the history of old New England, it seems as though the 
sun shone but dimly there, and the landscape was always 
dark and wintry. Such is the impression which one 
carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's 
and Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's "Wonders of the 
Invisible World" — an impression of gloom, of night 
and cold, of mysterious fears besieging the infant settle- 
ments scattered in a narrow fringe " between the groaning 
forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New 
England for more than half a century, or until the issue 
of King Philip's War, in 1676, relieved the colonists of any 
danger of a general massacre. Added to this were the 
perplexities caused by the earnest resolve of the settlers to 
keep their New England Eden free from the intrusion of 
the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in religion. The 
puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and conserv- 
ative puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops 
of the movement in the old Enorland found no toleration 



The Colonial Period. 21 

iu the new. But these refugees for conscience' sake were 
compelled in turn to persecute Antinomians, Separatists, 
Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and later, Quakers, 
and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their i)re- 
cincts and troubled the churches with " prophesyings " 
and novel opinions. Some of these were banished, others 
were flogged or imprisoned, and a few were put to death. 
Of the exiles the most noteworthy was Roger Williams, 
an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was so far in ad- 
vance of his age as to deny the power of the civil magis- 
trate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, main- 
tained the modern doctrine of the separation of church and 
state. Williams was driven away from the Massachusetts 
colony — where he had been minister of the church at 
Salem — and with a few followers fled into the southern 
wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the 
neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he ob- 
tained a charter, he established his patriarchal rule and 
gave freedom of worship to all comers. Williams was a 
prolific writer on theological subjects, the most important 
of his writings being, perhaps, his " Bloody Tenent of Per- 
secution," 1644, and a supplement to the same called out by 
a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John Cot- 
ton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled " The 
Bloody Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of 
the Lamb." Williams was also a friend to the Indians, 
whose lands, he thought, should not be taken from them 
without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing, in 
1643, a "Key into the Language of America." Although 
I at odds with the theology of Massachusetts Baj^, Williams 
remained in correspondence with Winthrop and others in 
Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He visited 
England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of 
John Milton. 



22 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious 
concern for the puritj^ of the gospel in their churches, the 
colonists were haunted by superstitious forebodings of the 
darkest kind. It seemed to them tliat Satan, angered by 
tlie setting up of tlie kingdom of tlie saints in America, had 
' ' come down in great wrath, " and was present among them, 
sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. 
Special providences and unusual plienomena, like earth- 
quakes, mirages, and the northern lights, are gravely re- 
corded by Winthrop and Mather and others as portents of 
supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, 
the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to 
rumor, been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John 
Cotton, in open assemblj^, at Boston, upon a lecture day, 
" thereupon gathered that it might signify her error in 
denying inherent righteousness." "There will be an un- 
usual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, " a 
little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening 
wolves will be much abroad when we are near the evening 
of the world." This belief culminated in the horrible 
witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that " spectral puppet 
play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a 
few children who accused certain uncanny old women and 
other persons of mean condition and suspected lives of 
having tormented them with magic, gradually drew into 
its vortex victims of the highest character, and resulted in 
the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the 
possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition 
of a little black man, who urged them to inscribe their 
names in a red book which he carried — a sort of muster-roll 
of those who had forsworn God's service for the devil's. 
Others testified to having been present at meetings of 
^vitches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without 
contempt tlie "evidence" which grave justices and 



The Colonial Period. 23 

learned divines considered sufficient to condemn to death 
men and women of unblemished lives. It is true that the 
belief in witchcraft was general at that time all over the 
civilized world, and that sporadic cases of witch-burnings 
had pccurred in different parts of America and Europe. 
Sir Thomas Browne, in his " Religio Medici," 1635, affirmed 
his belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of 
them " a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a 
head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more 
shocliing from the general high level of intelligence in the 
community in which these were held. It would be well if 
those who lament the decay of *' faith " would remember 
what things were done in New England in the name of 
faith less than two hundred years ago. It is not wonder- 
ful that to the Massachusetts Puritans of the seventeenth 
century, the mysterious forest held no beautiful sugges- 
tions ; to them it was simply a grim and hideous wilder- 
ness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling sav- 
ages and the rendezvous of those other " devil-worshipers " 
who celebrated there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis night. 

The most important of original sources for the history 
of the settlement of New England are the Journals of 
William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, and John 
Winthrop, the second governor of Massachusetts, which 
hold a place corresponding to the writings of Captain 
John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more 
sober and trustworthy. Bradford's " History of Plymouth 
Plantation " covers the period from 1620 to 1646. The man- 
uscript was used by later annalists, but remained unpub- 
lished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost during the 
War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in 
England. Winthrop's Journal, or " History of New Eng- 
land," begun on shipboard in 1630 and extending to 1649, 
was not published entire until 1826. It is of equal author- 



24 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

ity with Bradford's, and perhaps, on the whole, the more 
important of the two, as tlie colony of Massachusetts Bay, 
whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in 
wealth and population, though not in priority of settle- 
ment. The interest of Winthrop's Journal lies in the 
events that it records rather than in any charm in the his- 
torian's manner of recording them. His style is prag- 
matic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes 
are trivial to the modern mind, though instructive as to 
our forefathers' way of thinking. For instance, of the 
year 1 632 : * 'At Watertown there was (in the view of divers 
witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake, 
and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the 
snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, 
holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation : that the 
snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor, contemptible 
people, which God had brought hither, which should over- 
come Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The 
reader of Winthrop's Journal comes everywhere upon hints 
which the imagination has since shaped into poetry and 
romance. The germs of many of Longfellow's **New 
England Tragedies," of Hawthorne's " Maypole of Merry- 
mount," and "Endicott's Red Cross," and of Whittier's 
*' John Underbill " and " The Familists' Hymn " are all to 
be found in some drj^, brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. 
" Robert Cole, having been oft punished for drunkenness, 
was now ordered to wear a red D about his neck for a 
year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to 
the greatest American romance, ''The Scarlet Letter." 
The famous apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven 
harbor, "upon the top of the poop a man standing with 
one hand akimbo under his left side, and in his right hand 
a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first chronicled 
by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological 



The Colonial Period. 25 

phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth 
some forty years later, as related, Avith many embellish- 
ments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of New Haven, in a letter 
to Cotton Mather. Winthrop i)ut great faith in special 
providences, and among other instances narrates, not with- 
out a certain grim satisfaction, how " the Mary Hose, a 
ship of Bristol, of about two hundred tons," lying before 
Charleston, was blown in pieces with her own powder, 
being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God 
appeared, "for the master and company were many of 
them profane scoffers at us and at the ordinances of re- 
ligion here." Without any effort at dramatic portraiture 
or character sketching, Winthrop managed in all sim- 
plicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear 
imj^ression of many prominent figures in the first Massa- 
chusetts immigration. In particular there gradually arises 
from the entries in his diary a very distinct and diverting 
outline of Captain John Underhill, celebrated in Whit- 
tier's poem. He was one of the few i3rofessional soldiers 
who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as John 
Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, 
whose ** Courtship " Longfellow sang. He had seen service 
in the Low Countries, and in pleading the x^rivilege of his 
profession "he insisted much upon the liberty which all 
states do allow to military officers for free speech, etc., and 
that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count 
Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of 
trouble, both by his scandalous living and his heresies in 
religion. Having been seduced into Familistical opinions 
by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was banished for her be- 
liefs, he w^as had up before the General Court and ques- 
tioned, among other points, as to his own report of the 
manner of his conversion. " Pie had lain under a spirit of 
bondage and a legal way for years, and could ^et no assur- 



26 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

ance, till, at length, as he was taking a pipe of tobacco, the 
Spirit set home an absolute promise of free grace with such 
assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his good 
estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin. 
. . . The Lord's day following he made a speech in the 
assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to convert 
Paul as he was in persecuting, etc., so he might manifest 
himself to him as he was taking the moderate use of the 
creature called tobacco." The gallant captain, being ban- 
ished the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscata- 
quack (Exeter, N. H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, 
another adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson, had gathered a con- 
gregation. Being made governor of this plantation, Un- 
derhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates, breath- 
ing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance. But mean- 
while it was discovered that he had been living in adul- 
tery at Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced, 
the wife of a cooper, and the captain was forced to make 
public confession, which he did with great unction and in 
a manner highly dramatic. " He came in his worst clothes 
(being accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and 
neatness), without a band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled 
close to his ej^es, and standing upon a form, he did, with 
many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay open his 
wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the grave 
Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Win- 
throp's own personality comes out well in his Journal. 
He was a born leader of men, a conditor imperii, just, 
moderate, patient, wise ; and his narrative gives, upon the 
whole, a favorable impression of the general prudence and 
fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their 
dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the 
neighboring plantations. 

Considerinir our forefathers' errand and callino: into this 



The Colonial Period. 



wilderness, it is not strange that their chief literary staples 
were sermons and tracts in controversial theology. Multi- 
tudes of these were written and published by the divines 
of the first generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas Shep- 
ard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the 
founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that 
" when he was doing his Master's business he would put a 
king into his pocket." Nor were their successors in the 
second or the third generation any less industrious and 
prolific. They rest from their labors and their works do 
follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are 
not literature : they are for the most part dry, heavy, and 
dogmatic, but they exhibit great learning, logical acute- 
ness, and an earnestness which sometimes rises into elo- 
quence. The pulpit ruled New England, and the sermon 
was the great intellectual engine of the time. The serious 
thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to 
religion ; the other world was all their art. The daily 
secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude 
of the seasons, were important enough to find record in 
print only in so far as they manifested God's dealings with 
his people. So much was the sermon depended upon to 
furnish literary food that it was the general custom of 
serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the dis- 
course in their note-books. Franklin, in his " Autobiog- 
raphy^," describes this as the constant habit of his grand- 
father, Peter Folger ; and Mather, in his life of the elder 
Winthrop, says that " tlio' he wrote not after the preacher, 
yet such was his attention and such his retention in hear- 
ing, that he repeated unto his familj^ the sermons which 
he had heard in the congregation." These discourses were 
commonly of great length ; twice, or sometimes thrice, the 
pulpit hour-glass was silently inverted while the orator 
pursued his theme even unto " fourteen thly." 



28 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

The book which best sums up the Hfe and thought of this 
old New Enghmd of the seventeentli ceutury is Cotton 
Mather's " Magnalia Cliristi Americana." Mather was by 
birth a member of that clerical aristocracy which devel- 
oped later into Dr. Holmes's *' Brahmin caste of New 
Ij^ngland." His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. 
His father was Increase Mather, the most learned divine of 
his generation in New England, minister of the North 
Church of Boston, president of Harvard College, and au- 
thor, inter alia, of that characteristically Puritan book, 
"An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences." 
Cotton Mather himself was a monster of erudition and a 
prodigy of diligence. He was graduated from Harvard at 
fifteen. He ordered his daily life and conversation by a sys- 
tem of minute observances. He was a book-worm, whose 
life was spent between his library and his pulj^it, and his 
published works number upward of three hundred and 
eighty. Of these the most important is the " Magnalia," 
1702, an ecclesiastical history of New England from 1620 to 
1698, divided into seven parts : I. Antiquities ; II. Lives 
of the Governors ; III. Lives of Sixty Famous Divines ; 
IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies 
of its eminent graduates ; V. Acts and Monuments of 
the Faith ; VI. Wonderful Providences ; VII. The Wars 
of the Lord — that is, an account of the Afflictions 
and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts 
with the Indians. The plan of the work thus united that 
of Fuller's "Worthies of England" and "Church His- 
tory" with that of Wood's "Athense Oxonienses " and 
Fox's "Book of Martyrs." 

Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Com- 
monwealth writers used. He was younger by a generation 
than Dryden ; but, as literary fashions are slower to change 
in a colony than in the mother-countrj", that nimble Eng- 



The Colonial Period. 29 

lish which Dryden and the Restoration essayists intro- 
duced had not yet displaced in New England tlie older 
manner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant stj^le of 
Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponder- 
ous w^ith learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, 
conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the 
Latin. A page of the " Magnalia " is almost as richly 
mottled with italics as one from the "Anatomy of Melan- 
choly," and the quaintness which Mather caught from his 
favorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal 
anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his books and chaj)- 
ters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having '''^ angled 
many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," ana- 
grammatizes Mrs. Hutchinson's surname into " the non- 
such " ; and having occasion to speak of Mr. Urian Oakes's 
election to the presidency of Harvard College, enlarges 
upon the circumstance as follows : 

" We all know that Britain knew nothing more famous 
than their ancient sect of DRUIDS ; the philosophers, 
whose order, they saj^, was instituted by one Samothes, 
which is in English as much as to say, an heavenly man. 
The Celtic name, Deru, for an Oak was that from whence 
they received their denomination ; as at this very day the 
Welsh call this tree Drew, and this order of men Derwyddon. 
But there are no small antiquaries who derive this oaken 
religion SiU.^ phlloso]phij from the Oaks of Mature, where the 
Patriarch Abraham had as well a dwelling as an altar. 
That Oaken-Plain and the eminent OAK under which 
Abraham, lodged was extant in the days of Constantine, as 
Isidore, Jerom, and Sozomen have assured us. Yea, there 
are shrewd probabilities that Noa7i himself had lived in 
this very Oak-plain before him ; for this very place was called 
Ogge, which was the name of Noah, so styled from the 
Oggyan {subcineritiis panibus) sacrifices, which he did use to 



30 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

offer in this renowned Grove. And it was from this ex- 
ample that the ancients, and particularly that the Druids 
of the nations, chose oaken retirements for their studies. 
Reader, let us now, upon another account, behold the stu- 
dents of Harvard College^ as a rendezvous of happy Druids^ 
under the influences of so rare a president. But, alas ! our 
joy must be short-lived, for on July 25, 1681, the stroke of a 
sudden death felled the tree, 

" Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes 
Quantum lenta sclent inter viberna cypressi. 

Mr. Oakes thus being transplanted into the better world the 
presidentship was immediately tendered unto Mr. Increase 
Mather. ^^ 

This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and labo- 
rious pedantry which disfigured Mather's writing. In its 
substance the book is a i)erfect thesaurus ; and inasmuch as 
nothing is unimportant in the history of the beginnings of 
such a nation as this is and is destined to be, the " Mag- 
nalia " will always remain a valuable and interesting work. 
Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation 
of Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, 
but his father a native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison 
of his writings, and of the writings of his contemporaries, 
with the works of Bradford, Winthrop, Hooker, and others 
of the original colonists, shows that the simple and heroic 
faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and 
doctrinal rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, not- ' 
withstanding their intolerance of errors in belief, were J 
comparatively broad-minded men. They were sharers in a 
great national movement, and they came over when their ^ 
cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the ^ 
eve of its coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, ^ 
in 1660, the currents of national feeling no longer circulated ^ 
so freely through this distant member of the body politic, 



The Colonial Period. 31 

and thought in America became more provincial. The 
English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage as 
compared with the Church of England, had the great bene- 
fit of living at the center of national life, and of feeling 
about them the pressure of vast bodies of people who did 
not think as they did. In New England, for many gen- 
erations, the dominant sect had things all its own way — a 
condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or 
party. Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear 
in their writings very much like so many Puritan bishops, 
jealous of their prerogatives, magnifying their apostolate, 
and careful to maintain their authority over the laity. 
Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a lead- 
ing part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an ac- 
count in his "Wonders of the Invisible World," 1693. To 
the quaint pages of the " Magnalia " our modern authors 
have resorted as to a collection of romances or fairy tales. 
Whittier, for example, took from thence the subject of his 
poem "The Garrison of Cape Anne"; and Hawthorne 
embodied in "Grandfather's Chair" the most elaborate of 
Mather's biographies. This was the life of Sir William 
Phipps, who from being a poor shepherd boy in his native 
province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massa- 
chusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures 
in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef 
near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like 
some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, 
and j)late and jewels, and " pieces of eight." 

Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, chief-justice 
of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable fig- 
ure, who is intimately known through his Diary, kept from 
1673 to 1729. This has been compared with the more 
famous Diary of Samuel Pepys, which it resembles in its 
confidential character and the completeness of its self-reve- 



32 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



lation, but to which it is as much inferior io historic inter- 
est as "the petty province here " was inferior in political 
and social importance to "Britain far away." For the 
most part it is a chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting 
down the minutise of his domestic life and private affairs, 
even to the recording of such haps as this : " March 23, I 
had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also affords in- 
structive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's 
War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, 
etc. It bears about the same relation to New England his- 
tory at the close of the seventeenth century as Bradford's 
and Winthrop's Journals bear to that of the first generation. 
Sewall was one of the justices who presided at the trial of 
the Salem witches ; but for the part which he took in 
that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possi- 
ble, by open confession of his mistake and his remorse in 
the presence of the church. Sewall was one of the first 
writers against African slavery, in his brief tract, "The 
Selling of Joseph," printed at Boston in 1700. His " Phe- 
nomena Queedam Apocal^^ptica," a mystical interpretation 
of prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he 
identifies with America, is remembered only because 
Whittier, in his " Prophecy of Sarnuel Sewall," has para- 
phrased one poetic passage which shows a loving observa- 
tion of nature very rare in our colonial writers. 

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the 
narrower sense — that is, of the imaginative representation 
of life — there was little or none in the colonial period. 
There were no novels, no plays, no satires, and — until the 
example of the "Spectator" had begun to work on this 
side the water — no experiments even at the lighter forms 
of essay-writing, character sketches, and literary criticism. 
There was verse of a certain kind, but the most gener- 
ous stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called 



ii 



The Colonial Period. 33 

poetry. Many of the earl}^ divines of New England relieved 
their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, of epigrams, 
elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles dis- 
tinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphys- 
ical poets," whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans 
left England ; the manner of Donne and Cowley, and those 
darlings of the New English muse, the "Emblems" of 
Quarles and the "Divine Week" of Du Bartas, as trans- 
lated by S3dvester. The "Magnalia" contains a number 
of these things in Latin and English, and is itself well bol- 
stered with complimentary introductions in meter by the 
author's friends. For example : 

COTTONIUS MATHERUS. 
ANAGRAM. 

Tuos Tecum Ornasti. 
" While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise 
Thine^ with thyself thou dost immortalize. 
To view the odds thy learned lives invite 
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. 
But all succeeding ages shall despair 
A fitting monument for thee to rear. 
Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) 
Hath given them a lasting 7vrit of ease.^^ 

The epitai^hs and mortuary verses were especially in- 
genious in the matter of puns, anagrams, and similar con- 
ceits. The death of the Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, 
afforded an opportunity of this sort not to be missed, and 
his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a " whet- 
stone," a " loadstone," an " Ebenezer " — 

" A stone for kingly David's use so fit 
As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc. 

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated 
poem of colonial New England was Michael Wiggles- 
worth's "Day of Doom" (1662), a kind of doggerel "In- 
ferno," which went through nine editions, and " was the 



34 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

solace," says Lowell, " of every fireside, the flicker of the 
pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a live- 
lier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." 
Wigglesworth had not the technical equipment of a poet. 
His verse is sing-song, his language rude and monotonous, , 
and the lurid horrors of his material hell are more likely to I 
move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are 
an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of , 
belief in his gloomy poem which hold it far above con- f 
tempt, and easily account for its universal currency among 
a people like the Puritans. One stanza has been often 
quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants of 
'' the easiest room in hell " — a limbus infantum, which even 
Origen need not have scrupled at. 

The most authoritative expounder of New England Cal- 
vinism was Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), a native of Con- 
necticut and a graduate of Yale, who was minister for 
more than twenty years over the church in Northampton, 
Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, 
and at the time of his death had just been inaugurated 
president of Princeton College. By virtue of his " Inquiry 
into the Freedom of the Will," 1754, Edwards holds rank 
as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise 
was composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the 
Calvinistic doctrines of foreordination and election by 
grace, though its arguments are curiously coincident with 
those of the scientific necessitarians, whose conclusions are 
as far asunder from Edwards's " as from the center thrice 
to the utmost pole." His writings belong to theology 
rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a 
spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity 
and acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and 
there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imagina- 
tive art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the com- 



II 



The Colonial Period. 35 

fort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas 
of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal 
punishment. The titles of his sermons are significant : 
"Men Naturally God's Enemies," "Wrath upon the 
Wicked to the Uttermost," "The Final Judgment," etc. 
"A natural man," he wrote in the first of tliese discourses, 
" has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of a 
natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, 
cold corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most famous of 
Edwards's sermons was "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God," preached at Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, "at a time 
of great awakenings," and upon the ominous text, Their 
foot shall slide in due time. " The God that holds you over 
the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this pow- 
erful denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one 
holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, ab- 
hors you, and is dreadfully provoked. . . . You are ten 
thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most 
hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by 
a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing 
about it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be 
so far from pitying you in your doleful case that he will 
only tread you under foot. . . . He will crush out your 
blood and make it fLy^ and it shall be sj^rinkled on his gar- 
ments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a 
rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the 
God, and there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling 
in his "Treatise concerning Religious Affections," 174G. 
Such is his portrait of Sarah Pierpont, " a young lady in 
New Haven," who afterward became his wife and who 
" will sometimes go about from place to place singing 
sweetly, and no one knows for what. She loves to be 
alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have 
some one invisible always conversing with her." Ed- 



36 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

wards's printed works number thirty-six titles. A com- 
plete edition of tiiem in ten volumes was published in 1829 
by his great-grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda 
from Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biog- 
rapher, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a school- 
boy and a college student he had made deep guesses in 
physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been 
predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal 
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying 
the existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Ed- 
wards we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth cen- 
tury. There is the same difference between them in style 
and turn of thought as between Milton and Locke, or be- 
tween Fuller and Dryden. The learned digressions, the 
witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with 
scraps of Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed 
wig and the clerical gown and bands have been laid aside 
for tlie undistinguishing dress of the modern minister. 
In Edwards's English all is simple, precise, direct, and 
business-like. 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contem- 
porary with Edwards, was a contrast to him in every 
respect. As Edwards represents the spirituality and other 
worldliness of puritanism, Franklin stands for the worldly 
and secular side of American character, and he illustrates 
the development of the New England Englishman into 
the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without 
ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, in- 
tensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, 
shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical 
of his time and his people. He was the first and the only 
man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmo- 
politan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism 
upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of 



The Colonial Period. 87 

common sense and of the useful virtues, with tlie enterprise 
but without the nervousness of his modern compatriots, 
uniting the philosopher's openness of mind to the sagacity 
and quickness of resource of tlie self-made business man. 
He was representative also of his age, an age of cmfkldrung, 
eclair cissement, or "clearing up." By the middle of the 
eighteenth century a change had taken place in American 
society. Trade had increased between the different col- 
onies ; Boston, New York, and Philadeli^hia were consid- 
erable towns ; democratic feeling was spreading ; over forty 
newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of 
the Revolution ; politics claimed more attention than for- 
merly, and theology less. With all this intercourse and 
mutual reaction of the various colonies upon one another, 
the isolated theocracy of New England naturally relaxed 
somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When 
Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type 
on his brother's JS'ew England Courant, the fourth Amer- 
ican newspaper, he got hold of an odd volume of the 
"Spectator," and formed his style upon Addison, whose 
manner he afterward imitated in his " Busybody " papers 
in the Philadelphia Weekly Mercury. He also read Locke 
and the English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, 
and became himself a deist and free-thinker ; and subse- 
quently when practicing his trade in London, in 1724-26, 
he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of 
the " Fable of the Bees," at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, 
called "The Horns," where the famous free-thinker pre- 
sided over a club of wits and boon companions. Though 
a native of Boston, Franklin is identified Avith Philadel- 
phia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy, 
" whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about 
a shilling in copper." The description in his " Autobiog- 
raphy " of his walking up Market Street munching a loaf 



38 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

of bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her 
father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the an- 
ecdote about Whittington and his cat. 

It was in the practical sphere that Franlilin was greatest, 
as an originator and executor of projects for the general 
welfare. The list of his public services is almost endless. 
He organized the Philadelphia fire department and street- 
cleaning service, and the colonial i^ostal system which 
grew into the United States Post-office Department. He 
started the Philadelphia public library, the American Phil- 
osophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 
first American magazine. The General Magazine and His- 
toriccd Chronicle; so that he was almost singly the father 
of whatever intellectual life the Pennsylvania colony could 
boast. In 1754, when commissioners from the colonies met 
at Albanj^, Franklin proposed a plan, which was adopted, 
for the union of all the colonies under one government. 
But all these things, as well as his mission to England 
in 1757, on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly in its dis- 
pute with the proprietaries ; his share in the Declaration of 
Independence, of w^hich he was one of the signers ; and 
his residence in France as ambassador of the United Colo- 
nies, belong to the political history of the country ; to the 
history of American science belong his celebrated experi- 
ments in electricity ; and his benefits to mankind in both 
of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous 
epigram of the French statesman Turgot : 

" Eripuit ccelo fuhnen, sceptrumque tyrannis.^' 
Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American 
had yet achieved, as few Americans since him have 
achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among his acquaint- 
ances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly 
idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, " The 
genius which has freed America and poured a flood of light 



Tlie Colonial Period. 39 

over Europe has returned to the bosom of the Divinity." 
Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, 
though as a writer, too, he had many admirable and some 
great qualities. Among these were the crystal clearness 
and simplicity of his style. His more strictly literary per- 
formances, such as his essays after the " Spectator," hardly 
rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor worse than 
other imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter 
bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming play- 
fulness which have won them enduring favor. Such are 
his famous story of the " Whistle," his " Dialogue between 
Franklin and the Gout," his letters to Madame Helvetius, 
and his verses entitled "Paper." The greater portion of 
his writings consists of papers on general politics, com- 
merce, and political economy, contributions to the public 
questions of his day. These are of the nature of journalism 
rather than of literature, and many of them were published 
in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette^ the medium 
through which for many years he most strongly influenced 
American opinion. The most jjopular of his writings were 
his "Autobiography" and "Poor Richard's Almanac." 
The former of these was begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, 
but never completed. It has remained the most widely 
current book in our colonial literature. "Poor Richard's 
Almanac," begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty- 
five years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand 
copies. It was filled with proverbial sayings in prose and 
verse, inculcating the virtues of industry, honesty, and 
frugality.* Some of these were original with Franklin, oth- 
ers were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, but 
a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression. 



*"The Way to Wealth," "Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand 
Pounds," " Rules of Health," "Advice to a Young Tradesman," " The 
Way to Make Money Plenty in Every Man's Pocket," etc. 



40 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Poor Richard's saws were such as these : " Little strokes 
fell great oaks" ; "Three removes are as bad as a fire" ; 
"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, 
wealthy, and wise"; "Never leave that till to-morrow 
which you can do to-day" ; "What maintains one vice 
would bring up two children " ; " It is hard for an empty 
bag to stand upright." 

Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than 
these In Franklin, and Sainte-Beuve, the great French 
critic, quotes, as an example of his occasional finer moods, 
the saying, " Truth and sincerity have a certain distin- 
guishing native luster about them which cannot be coun- 
terfeited ; they are like fire and flame that cannot be 
painted." But the sago who invented the Franklin stove 
had no disdain of small utilities ; and in general the last 
word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage of 
his "Autobiography": "Human felicity is produced not 
so much by great pieces of good fortune, that seldom hap- 
pen, as by little advantages that occur every day : thus, if 
you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep 
his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happi- 
ness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas." 

1. Captain John Smith : "A True Relation of Vir- 
ginia." Deane's edition. Boston : 1866. 

2. Cotton Mather: "Magnalia Christi Americana." 
Hartford: 1820. 

3. Samuel Sew ALL : "Diary." Massachusetts Historical 
Collections, fifth series. Vols. V.-VII. Boston : 1878. 

4. Jonathan Edwards: "Eight Sermons on Various 
Occasions." Vol. VII. of Edwards's Works. Edited by 
Sereno Dwight. New York : 1829. 

5. Benjamin Franklin : "Autobiography." Edited by 
John Bigelow. Philadelphia : 1869. 



The Colonial Period. 41 



6. Benjamin Franklin : "Essays and Bagatelles." 
Vol. II. of Franklin's Works. Edited by Jared Sparks. 
Boston : 1836. 

7. Moses Coit Tyler : "A History of American Lit- 
New York : 1878. 



CHAPTER II. 

The liEvoiiUTiONARY Period — 1765-1815. 

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which 
elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a 
congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against 
the Stamp Act, and tlie close of the second war with Eng- 
land, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. 
This half century was the formative era of the American 
nation. Historically-, it is divisible into the years of revo- 
lution and the years of construction. But the men who 
led the movement for independence were also, in great 
part, the same who guided in shaping the constitution of 
the new republic, and the intellectual impress of the whole 
period is one and the same. The character of the age was 
as distinctly political as that of the colonial era — in New 
England at least— was theological ; and literature must 
still continue to borrow its interest from history. Pure 
literature, or what, for want of a better term, we call 
belles-lettres^ was not born in America until the nineteenth 
century was well under way. It is true that the Revo- 
lution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction ; but 
these were strictly for the home market. They hardly 
penetrated the consciousness of Eurox)e at all, and are not 
to be compared with the contemporary work of English 
authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their im- 
portance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literarj^, 
though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned 
in due course in the present chapter. It is also true that 

42 



The Revolutionary Period. 43 

one or tv/o of Irving's early books fall within the last 
years of the period now under consideration. But literary 
epochs overlap one another at the edges, and these writ- 
ings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter. 

Among the most characteristic 23roducts of the intellect- 
ual stir that preceded and accompanied the revolutionary 
movement were the speeches of political orators like 
Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, in Mass- 
achusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the 
art of a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of 
Greece and Rome and in the Parliament of Great Britain, 
so in the conventions and Congresses of revolutionary 
America it sprang up and flourished naturally. The age, 
moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical age ; 
and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the de- 
clamatory "Letters of Junius," and of the speeches of 
Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in 
the debates of our early Congresses. The fame of a great 
orator, like that of a great actor, is largely traditionary. 
The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses the 
glow which resided in the man and the moment. A 
speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers 
to the end which is sought. But the fact that this end is 
often temporary and occasional, rather than universal and 
permanent, explains why so few speeches are really litera- 
ture. If this is true, even where the words of an orator 
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly 
true when we have only the testimony of contemporaries 
as to the effect which the oration produced. The fiery 
utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either not re- 
ported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that posterity 
can judge of them only at second hand. Patrick Henry 
has fared better, many of his orations being preserved in 
substance, if not in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these 



44 Initial Studies in American Letters. " 

the most famous was the defiant speech in the Convention 
of Delegates, March 28, 1775, tlirowing down tlie gauge of 
battle to the British ministry. The ringing sentences of 
this challenge are still declaimed by schoolboys, and many 
of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have 
but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the 
lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of 
the future but by the past. . . . Gentlemen may cry 
peace, peace, but there is no peace. ... Is life so dear, 
or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of 
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God ! I know 
not what course others may take, but as for me, give 
me liberty, or give me death !" The eloquence of Patrick 
Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But if 
such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as 
have come down to us fail to account for the wonderful 
impression that their words are said to have produced 
upon their fellow-countrymen, we should remember that 
they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard. 
The imagination should supply all those accessories which 
gave them vitality when first pronounced — the living pres- 
ence and voice of the speaker ; the listening Senate ; the 
grave excitement of the hour and of the imj)ending con- 
flict. The wordiness and exaggeration ; the highly latin- 
ized diction ; the rhapsodies about freedom which hun- 
dreds of Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into 
platitudes — all these coming hot from the liiDS of men 
whose actions in the field confirmed the earnestness of 
their speech — were efiective in the crisis and for the 
purpose to which they were addressed. 

The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less 
potent than the platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, 
Quincy, Warren, and Hancock wrote constantly, for 'the 
newspapers, essays and letters on the jiublic questions of the 



The Revolutionary Period. 45 



time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent," 
j " Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language 
which to the taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical. 
I Among the most important of these political essays were 
I the "Circular Letter to each Colonial Legislature," pub- 
j lislied by Adams and Otis in 17G8, Quincy's " Observa- 
I tions on the Boston Port Bill," 1774, and Otis's "Rights 
of the British Colonies," a pamphlet of one hundred and 
twenty pages, printed in 1764. No collection of Otis's 
writings has ever been made. The life of Quincy, pub- 
lished by his son, preserves for posterity his journals and 
correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at 
the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law rej)orts. 

Among the political literature which is of perennial in- 
terest to the American people are such state documents as 
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the 
United States, and the messages, inaugural addresses, and 
other w^ritings of our early presidents. Thomas Jefferson, 
the third president of the United States, and the father of 
the Democratic party, w^as the author of the Declaration of 
Independence, whose oj^ening sentences have become com- 
monplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in 
particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration 
of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion : " We 
hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are cre- 
ated equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern 
readers is the following, w^hich an English historian of our 
literature calls " the most eloquent clause of that great doc- 
ument," and "the most interesting suppressed passage in 
American literature." Jefferson was a southerner, but 
even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on 
the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King 



46 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

George for promoting the "peculiar iDstitiition " was left 
out from tlie final draft of tlie Declaration in deference to 
southern members. 

"He has Avaged cruel war against human nature itself, 
violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the 
persons of a distant people who never ofTended him, cap- 
tivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemi- 
sphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation 
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel 
powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great 
Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men 
should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative 
by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this ex- 
ecrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors 
might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting 
those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase 
that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the 
people upon w^hom he obtruded them, and thus paying off 
former crimes committed against the liberties of one peo- 
ple by crimes which he urges them to commit against the 
lives of another." 

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other 
southern statesmen afterward adopted on the subject of 
slavery was not taken by the men of Jefferson's generation. 
Another famous Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, 
liimself a slave-holder, in his speech on the militia bill in 
the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said : " I 
speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls 
for fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug her in- 
fant more closely to her bosom." This was said apropos of 
the danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a war 
with England — a war which actually broke out in the year 
following, but was not attended with the slave-rising which 
Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thoroughgoing 



The Revolutionary Period. 47 

I "state rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on 

I principle, he cried "Hands off!" to any interference by 
the general government with the domestic institutions of 

I the states. His si^eeches read better than most of his con- 
temporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of a 

i bitter and eccentric individuality ; Mitty, incisive, and ex- 
pressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts re- 
freshingly with the diplomatic language and glittering 
generalities of most congressional oratory, whose verbiage 
seems to keep its subject always at arm's-length. 

! Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his In- 
augural Address of March 4, 1801, with its program of 
"equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or 
persuasion, religious or political ; peace, commerce, and 
honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances 
with none ; the support of the state governments in all 

' their rights ; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions 
of the majority ; . . . the supremacy of the civil over 
the military'' authority ; economy in the public expense ; 
freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of 
person under tlie protection of the habeas corpus^ and trial 
by juries impartially selected." 

During his six years' residence in France, as American 
minister, Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the 
principles of French democrac3\ His main service and that 
of his party — the Democratic, or, as it was then called, the 
Rej)ublican party — to the young republic was in its insist- 
ence upon toleration of all beliefs, and upon the freedom of 
the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. 
Jefferson has some claims to rank as an author in general 
literature. Educated at William and Mary College in the 
old Virginia capital, Williamsburg, he became the founder 
of the University of Virginia, in which he made special 
provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the 



1 



48 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed 
in theory, at least, to the " university idea." His " Notes 
on Virginia " are not without literary quality, and one de- 
scription, in particular, has been often quoted — the passage 
of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge— in which is this 
poetically imaginative touch : " The mountain being cloven 
asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small 
catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the 
plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and 
tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and par- 
ticipate of the calm below." 

After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, 
political discussion centered about the constitution, which 
in 1788 took the place of the looser Articles of Confederation 
adopted in 1778. The constitution as finally ratified was a 
compromise between two parties— the Federalists, who 
wanted a strong central government, and the Anti-Feder- 
als (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who 
wished to preserve state sovereignt3\ The debates on the 
adoption of the constitution, both in the general conven- 
tion of the states, which met at Philadelphia in 1787, and 
in the separate state conventions called to ratify its action, 
form a valuable body of comment and illustration upon the 
instrument itself. One of the most notable of the speeches in 
opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the Virginia 
Convention. '* That this is a consolidated government," 
he said, " is demonstrably clear ; and the danger of such a 
government is, to my mind, very striking." The leader of 
the Federal party was Alexander Hamilton, the ablest con- 
structive intellect among the statesmen of our revolution- 
ary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he "had never 
known his equal " ; whom Guizot classed with "the men 
who have best known the vital principles and fundamental 
conditions of a government worthy of its name and mis- 



The Revolutionary Period. 49 



sion." Hamilton's speech " On the Expediency of Adopt- 
ing the Federal Constitution," delivered in the Convention 
I of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of 
I the necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most 
j complete exposition of the constitutional philosophy of the 
I Federal party was the series of eighty-five papers entitled 
I "The FederaHst," printed during the years 1787-88, and 
mostly in the Independent Journal of New York, over the 
' signature " Publius." Tliese were the work of Hamilton, 
; of John Jay, afterward chief-justice, and of James Madi- 
I son, afterward president of the United States. The " Fed- 
eralist" papers, thougli written in a somewhat ponderous 
diction, are among the great landmarks of American his- 
tory, and were in themselves a political education to the 
generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant and 
versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and 
as secretary of the treasury under Washington the fore- 
most of American financiers. He was killed in a duel by 
Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in 1804. 

The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions 
of the new constitution George Washington was inaugu- 
rated first president of the United States, on March 4, 1789. 
Washington's writings have been collected by Jared 
Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, messages, ad- 
dresses, and public documents, for the most part plain 
and business-lilve in manner, and without any literary 
pretensions. The most elaborate and the best known of 
them is his " Farewell Address," issued upon his retire- 
ment from the presidency in 1796. In the composition 
of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and 
Jay. It is wise in substance and dignified, though some- 
what stilted in expression. The correspondence of John 
Adams, second president of the United States, and his 
Diary, kept from 1755-85, should also be mentioned as 



50 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

important sources for a full knowledge of this period 

In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain f 
against the French Republic and its successor, Napoleon !i 
Bonaparte, the Federalist party in this country naturally 
sympathized with England, and the JefFersonian democ- 
racy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the 
sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution and clung 
to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced ] 
freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of ^ 
monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they 
were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism 
and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the nat- 
ural order of things, the strength of the Federalist party 
was in New England, w4iich was socially democratic 
while the strength of the JefFersonians was in the South, 
whose social structure — owing to the system of slavery — 
was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with England 
was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury 
which it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the 
Hartford Convention of 1814 was more than suspected of a 
design to bring about the secession of New England from 
the Union. A good deal of oratory was called out by the 
debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain nego- 
tiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 
1798, and by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous 
to the downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson 
to the presidency in 1800. The best of the Federalist ora- 
tors during those j-ears was Fisher Ames, of Massachusetts, 
and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech on 
the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 
18, 1796. The speech was, in great measure, a protest 
against American chauvinism and the violation of interna- 
tional obligations. " It has been said the Avorld ought to 
rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea ; if where there are 



ii 



The Revolutionary Period. 61 

! now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no 
I more than a sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on ; space 
I for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . 
j What is i3atriotism ? Is it a narrow affection for the spot 
I where a man was born? Are the very clods where we 
I tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are 
' greener ? . . . I see no exception to the respect that is 
j paid among nations to the law of good faith. . . . It is 
observed by barbarians — a whiff of tobacco smoke or a 
string of beads gives not merely binding force but sanctity 
I to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce may be bought for 
money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise or too 
I just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames was a 
scholar, and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, 
more literary^ in a way, than those of his contemporaries. 
His eulogiums on Washington and Hamilton are elaborate 
I tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in 
classical allusions. In all the oratory of the revolutionary 
XDcriod there is nothing equal in deep and condensed en- 
ergy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg 
Address, *' that we here highly resolve that these dead 
shall not have died in vain." 

A prominent figure during and after the War of the Rev- 
olution was Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disre- 
spectfully called, " Tom Paine." He was a dissenting min- 
ister who, conceiving himself ill-treated by the British 
government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw him- 
self heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet, 
"Common Sense," issued in 1776, began with the famous 
words, " These are the times that try men's souls." This 
was followed by "The Crisis," a series of political essays 
advocating independence and the establishment of a repub- 
lic, published in periodical form, though at irregular in- 
tervals. Paine's rougli and vigorous advocacy was of great 



52 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

service to the American patriots. His writings were pop- 
ular and his arguments were of a kind easily understood 
by plain people, addressing themselves to the common 
sense, the prejudices and passions of unlettered readers. 
He afterward went to France and took an active part in 
the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke 
in liis " Riglits of Man," 1791-92, written in defense of the 
French Revolution. He was one of the two foreigners 
who sat in the Convention ; but falling under suspicion 
during the days of the Terror, lie was committed to the 
prison of the Luxemburg and only released upon the 
fall of Robespierre, July 27, 1794. While in prison he 
wrote a portion of his best-known work, ** The Age of 
Reason." This appeared in two parts in 1794 and 1795, 
the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to 
Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in 
Paris when Paine was sent to prison. 

"The Age of Reason" damaged Paine's reputation in 
America, where the name of "Tom Paine" became a 
stench in tlie nostrils of the godly, and a synonym for athe- 
ism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a hun- 
dred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away 
from the sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it 
might undermine. It was, in effect, a crude and popular 
statement of the deistic argument against Christianity. 
What the cutting logic and persiflage — the sourire hideux — 
of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser ma- 
terials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. 
Deism was in the air of the time ; Franklin, Jefferson, 
Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, and other prominent Americans 
were openly or unavowedly deistic. Free tliought, some- 
how, went along with democratic opinions, and w^as a part 
of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man 
without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He 



I 



The Revolutionary Period. 53 

i| . 

I was no scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of 
I the deeper and subtler aspects of the questions which he 
touched. In his examination of the Old and New Testa- 
I ments he insisted that the Bible was an imposition and a 
I forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities. Super- 
I natural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, 
was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and 
I churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of 
tyrants. This way of accounting for Christianity would 
not now be accepted by even the most "advanced " think- 
ers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has 
long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy 
and the temper of " The Age of Reason " belong to the 
eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious 
method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated 
doubters ; and in America well-thumbed copies of his 
book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern 
or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with 
the deacon or the schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument 
against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the in- 
credibility of miracles, the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty 
or immorality of Moses and David and other Old Testa- 
ment worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their 
gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as 
a critic are illustrated by his saying of the New Testa- 
ment : "Any person who could tell a story of an appari- 
tion, or of a man's walking, could have made such books, 
for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total of a 
parson's learning is a-6, a6, and /wc, hcBc^ Jioc, and this is 
more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived 
at the time, to have written all the books of the New 
Testament." 

When we turn from the political and controversial writ- 
ings of the Revolution to such lighter literature as existed. 



54 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

we find little that would deserve mention in a more 
crowded period. The few things in this kind that have 
kept afloat on the current of time — rari nantcs in giu^gite 
vas^o— attract attention rather by reason of their fewness 
than of any special excellence that they have. During the 
eighteenth century American literature continued to ac- 
commodate itself to changes of taste in the old country. 
The so-called classical or Augustan writers of the reign of 
Queen Anne replaced other models of style ; " The Spec- 
tator " set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, 
from Franklin's " Busybody " down to the time of Irving, 
who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later than any 
English writer. The influence of Locke, of Dr. Johnson, 
and of the parliamentary orators has already been men- 
tioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so 
that we find, for example, William Livingston, who be- 
came governor of New Jersey and a member of the Conti- 
nental Congress, writing in 1747 a j)oem on " Philosophic 
Solitude " which reproduces the tricks of Pope's antitheses 
and climaxes with the imagerj^ of the " Rape of the Lock," 
and the didactic morality of the " Imitations from Horace " 
and the " Moral Essays " : 

'* Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms, 
Pant after fame and rush to Avar's alarms ; 
To shining palaces let fools resort, 
And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. 
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, 
From noise remote and ignorant of strife, 
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, 
The lawless masquerade and midnight show ; 
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, 
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." 

The most popular poem of the revolutionary period was 
John Trumbull's " McFingal," published in part at Phila- 
delphia in 1775, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782. 
It went through more than thirty editions in America, and 



The Revolutionary Period. 56 

was several times reprinted in England. *' McFingal " was 
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyal- 
ists, and modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic 
poem, "Hudibras." As Butler's hero sallies forth to put 
down May games and bear-baitings, so the Tory McFingal 
goes out against the liberty poles and bonfires of the patri- 
ots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, 
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at 
Boston. The poem is written with smartness and vivacity, 
attains often to drollery, and sometimes to genuine humor. 
It remains one of the best of American political satires, 
and unquestionably the most successful of the many imi- 
tations of "Hudibras," whose manner it follows so closely 
that some of its lines, which have passed into currency as 
proverbs, are generally attributed to Butler. For example : 

" No man e'er felt the halter draw 
With good opinion of the law." 

Or this : 

" For any man with half an eye 
What stands before him may espy ; 
But optics sharp it needs, I ween, 
To see what is not to be seen." 

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his 
own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the 
couplet about the newly adopted flag of the Confederation : 

" Inscribed with inconsistent types 
Of liberty and thirteen stripes." 

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who 
made such noise in their time as " The Hartford Wits." 
The other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins, 
David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore 
Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and 
Barlow had formed a friendshijD and a kind of literary 
partnership at Yale, where they were contemporaries of 
each other and of Timothy Dwight. During the war they 



11 



56 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



served in the army in various capacities, and at its close 
they found themselves again together for a few years at 
Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for 
social and literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of 
€elat to the little provincial capital, and their writings 
made it for a time an intellectual center quite as important 
as Boston or Philadelphia or New York. The Hartford 
Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens freely in 
support of the administrations of AYashington and Adams, 
and in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 
Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published 
in the JSTew Haven G^a^JCifife a series of satirical papers entitled 
"The Anarchiad," suggested by the English " Rolliad," 
and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic on " the 
Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers 
were an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condi- 
tion of things which preceded the adoption of the federal 
constitution in 1789. It was a time of great confusion and 
discontent, when, in parts of the country. Democratic 
mobs were protesting against the vote of five years' pay by 
the Continental Congress to the officers of the American 
army. " The Anarchiad " was followed by "The Echo" 
and " The Political Green House," written mostly by Alsop 
and Theodore Dwight, and similar in character and tend- 
ency to the earlier series. Time has greatly blunted the 
edge of these satires, but they were influential in their day, 
and are an important part of the literature of the old Fed- 
eralist party. 

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplo- 
matic service, and was, successively, ambassador to Portu- 
gal and to Spain, whence he introduced into America the 
breed of merino sheep. He had been on Washington's 
staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of 
his house at Mount Yernon, where he produced, in 1785, 



The Revolutionary Period. 



the best known of his writings, " Mount Vernon," an ode 
of a rather mild description, wliicli once had admirers. 
Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in contemporary letters. 
After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, where 
he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in specula- 
tions, and became imbued with French principles, writing 
a song in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal 
to his old friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America 
and built a fine residence near Washington, which he 
called " Kalorama." Barlow's literary fame, in his own gen- 
eration, rested upon his prodigious epic, " The Columbiad." 
The first form of this was "The Vision of Columbus," joub- 
lished at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and 
enlarged into " The Columbiad," issued in Philadelphia in 
1807, and dedicated to Robert Fulton, the inventor of the 
steamboat. This was by far the most sumptuous jDiece of 
bookmaking that had then been published in America, and 
was embellished with plates executed by the best London 
engravers. 

" The Columbiad " was a grandiose performance, and has 
been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Haw- 
thorne suggested its being dramatized and put on to the ac- 
companiment of artillery and thunder and lightning ; and 
E. P.Whipple declared that ''no critic in the last fifty 
years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its 
ambitiousness and its length, it was symptomatic of the 
spirit of the age, which was patriotically determined to cre- 
ate, by tour de force, a national literature of a size com- 
mensurate with the scale of American nature and the 
destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than 
Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger ejDic than the 
"Iliad." Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Co- 
lumbus from his prison to a " hill of vision," where he un- 
rolls before his eye a panorama of the history of America, 



58 Initial Studies in A^nerican Letters. 

or, as our bards then preferred to call it, Columbia. He 
shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez ; the rise and 
fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru ; the settlements of 
the English colonies in North America ; the old French and 
Indian wars, the Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the 
future greatness of the new-born nation. The machinery 
of the "Vision" was borrowed from the eleventh and 
twelfth books of " Paradise Lost." Barlow's verse was the 
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style 
was distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and 
the false sublimity which marked the epic attempts of the 
Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow was but a masquer- 
ader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in mock 
heroic. His "Hasty Pudding," written in Savoy in 1793 
and dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly Amer- 
ican, in subject at least, and its humor, though over-elab- 
orate, is good. One couplet in particular has prevailed 
against oblivion : 

" E'en in thy native regions how I blush 
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush ! " 

Another Connecticut poet — one of the seven who were 
fondly named "The Pleiads of Connecticut " — was Timothy 
Dwight, whose "Conquest of Canaan," written shortly 
after his graduation from college, but not published till 
1785, was, like "The Columbiad," an experiment toward 
the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was 
written like Barlow's poem, in rhymed coujolets, and the 
jmtriotic impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduc- 
tion of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among 
the wars of Israel. " Greenfield Hill," 1794, was an idyllic 
and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in Con- 
necticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It 
is not quite without merit ; shows plainly the influence of 
Goldsmith, Thomson, and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious 



The JRevolutionary Period. 59 

and tame. Byron was amused that there should have been 
an American poet christened Timothy, and it is to be feared 
that amusement would have been the chief emotion 
kindled in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever 
chanced to see the stern dedication to himself of the same 
poet's "Triumph of Infidelity," 1788. Much more impor- 
tant than D wight's poetry was his able " Theology Ex- 
plained and Defended," 1794, a restatement, with modifi- 
cations, of the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which 
was accejDted by the Congregational churches of New 
England as an authoritative exponent of the orthodoxy of 
the time. His " Travels in New England and New York," 
including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, 
Lake George, the Catskills, and other passages of natural 
scenery, not so familiar then as now, was published posthu- 
mously in 1821, was praised by Southey, and is still read- 
able. As president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, 
Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with 
young men, and the force and dignity of his character, ex- 
erted a great influence in the community. 

The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex 
most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced. A 
number of ballads, serious and comic, Whig and Tory, 
dealing with the battles and other Incidents of the long 
war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or were 
hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these have 
no literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. 
A favorite piece on the Tory side was the ** Cow Chase," a 
cleverish parody on " Chevy Chase," written by the gal- 
lant and unfortunate Major Andr6, at the expense of 
"Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song "Yankee 
Doodle " was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the 
case with " John Brown's Body " and many other popular 
melodies, some obscurity hangs about its origin. The air 



60 Initial Studies in American Letters. , 

was an old one, and the words of the chorus seem to have 
been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied 
in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British 
army as early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the 
term Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nicknamed and 
proudly made their own. The stanza, 

'* Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., 
antedates the war ; but the first complete set of words to 
the tune was the *' Yankee's Return from Camp,'' which is 
apparently of the year 1775. The most popular humorous 1 1 
ballad on the Whig side was the " Battle of the Kegs," 
founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at Phila- 
delphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Phila- 
delphian, and one of the signers of the Declaration of 
Independence. Hopkinson had some title to rank as one 
of the earliest American humorists. Without the keen 
wit of "McFingal," some of his "Miscellaneous Essays 
and Occasional Writings," published in 1792, have more 
geniality and heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His 
"Letter on Whitewashing" is a bit of domestic humor 
that foretokens the Danbury News man ; and his " Modern 
Learning," 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in 
which a salt-box is described from the point of view of 
metaphysics, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, anat- 
omy, surgery, and chemistry, long kept its place in school- 
readers and other collections. His son, Joseph Hopkinson, 
wrote the song of "Hail Columbia," which is saved from 
insignificance only by the music to which it was married, 
the then popular air of "The President's March." The 
words were written in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war 
with France, and at a time when party spirit ran high. It 
was sung nightly by crowds in the streets, and for a whole 
season by a favorite singer at the theater ; for by this time 
there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and 



The Revolutionary Period. 61 



even in puritanic Boston. Much better tlian " Hail 
Columbia" was "The Star-Spangled Banner," the words 
of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, a Mary- 
lander, during the bombardment by tlie British of Fort 
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than 
these was the once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, 
Jr., "Adams and Liberty," recited at an anniversary of 
the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale of 
this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it is, 
notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was 
a young Harvard graduate, who had married an actress 
playing at the Old Federal Street Theater, the first play- 
house opened in Boston, in 1794. His name was originally 
Thomas, but this was changed for him by the Massachu- 
setts legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded 
with the author of " The Age of Reason." " Dim are those 
names erstwhile in battle loud," and many an old revolu- 
tionary worthy who fought for liberty with sword and pen 
is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only by some 
phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and 
there a line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a 
motto or inscription, while all its context is buried in 
oblivion. Few have read anything more of Jonathan M. 
Sewall's, for example, than the couplet, 

" No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours," 

taken from his "Epilogue to Cato," written in 1778. 

Another revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau— " that 
rascal Freneau," as Washington called him, Avhen annoyed 
by the attacks upon his administration in Freneau's Na- 
tional Gazette. He was of Huguenot descent, was a classmate 
of Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the 
British during the war, and when the war was over en- 
gaged in journalism as an ardent supporter of Jefferson 



62 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and the Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and politi- 
cal lampoons are now unreadable ; but lie deserves to rank 
as the first real American poet, by virtue of his "Wild 
Honeysuckle," "Indian Burying-Ground," "Indian Stu- 
dent," and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace 
and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood. 

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto 
mentioned were nothing but rhymers ; but in Freneau we 
meet with something of beauty and artistic feeling ; some- 
thing w^hich still keei3s his verses fresh. In his treatment 
of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a 
sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the char- 
acter and wild life of the red man, and that j^ensive senti- 
ment which the fading away of the tribes toward the sun- 
set has left in the wake of their retreating footsteps. In 
this Freneau anticipates Cooper and Longfellow, though 
his work is slight compared with the " Leatherstocking 
Tales " or " Hiawatha." At the time when the Revolu- 
tionary War broke out the population of the colonies was 
over three millions ; Philadelphia had thirty thousand in- 
habitants, and the frontier had retired to a comfortable dis- 
tance from the seaboard. The Indian had already grown 
legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his " In- 
dian Student " not from the outskirts of the settlement but 
from the remote backwoods of the state : 

" From Susquehanna's farthest springs 
Where savage tribes pursue their game 

(His blanket tied with yellow strings), 
A shepherd of the forest came." 

Campbell " hfted "— in his poem "O'Connor's Child"— 
the last line of the following stanza from Freneau's " In- 
dian Burying-Ground" : 

" By midnight moons o'er moistening dews, 
In vestments for the chase arrayed, 
The hunter still the deer pursues— 
The hunter and the deer, a shade." 



The Revolutionary Period. 63 

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in 
**Marmion," the final line of one of the stanzas of his 
poem on the battle of Eutaw Springs : 

" They saw their injured country's woe, 
The flaming town, the wasted field ; 

Then rushed to meet the insulting foe ; 
They took the spear, but left the shield." 

Scott inquired of an American gentlemen who visited him 
the authorship of this poem, which he had by heart, and 
pronounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in 
the language. 

The American drama and American prose fiction had their 
beginning during the period now under review. A com- 
pany of English players came to this country in 1752 and 
made the tour of many of the principal towns. The first 
play acted here by professionals on a public stage was 
the "Merchant of Venice," which was given by the Eng- 
lish company at Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first 
regular theater building was at Annapolis, Md., where in 
the same year this troupe performed, among other pieces, 
Farquhar's "Beaux' Stratagem." In 1753 a theater was 
built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The 
Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were 
strenuously opposed to the acting of plays, and in the latter 
city the players were several times arrested during the per- 
formances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding dramatic 
performances. At Newport, R. I., on the other hand, which 
w^as a health resort for planters from the Southern States 
and the West Indies, and the largest slave-market in the 
North, the actors were hospitably received. The first play 
known to have been written by an American was "The 
Prince of Parthia," 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas God- 
frey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American 
writer, acted by professionals in a public theater, was Roy- 



64 Initial Studies in American Letter, 



1 



all Tyler's "Contrast," performed in New York in 1786. 
The former of these was very high tragedy, and the lat- 
ter very low comedy ; and neither of them is otherwise 
remarkable than as "being the first of a long line of indif- 
ferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic 
literature worth speaking of; not a single American play 
of even the second rank, unless we except a few graceful 
parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's "Elevator'' and 
"Sleeping-Car." Royall Tyler, the author of "The Con- 
trast," cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, 
and eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His 
comedy, " The Georgia Spec," 1797, had a great run in Bos- 
ton, and his "Algerine Captive," published in the same 
year, was one of the earliest American novels. It was a 
rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the 
plan of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies 
which led to the war between the United States and Al- 
giers in 1815. 

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of 
any note, was also the first professional man of letters in 
this country w^ho supported himself entirely by his pen. He 
was born in Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in 
New York and part in his native city, where he started, in 
1803, The Literary Magazine and American Register. During 
the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession six ro- 
mances, "Wieland," "Ormond," "Arthur Mervyn," "Edgar 
Huntley," "Clara Howard," and "Jane Talbot." Brown 
was an invalid and something of a recluse, with a relish for 
the ghastly in incident and the morbid in character. He was 
in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne, though 
his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely 
so to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the 
contemporary school of fiction in England which preceded 
the " Waverley Novels "—to the class that includes Beck- 



The Revolutionary Period. 65 

ford's "Vathek," Godwin's "Caleb Williams" and "St. 
Leon," Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," and such "Gothic" 
romances as Lewis's "Monk," Walpole's "Castle of 
Otranto," and Mrs. RadclifFe's "Mysteries of Udolpho." 
A distinguishing characteristic of this whole school is what 
we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's romances are not 
wanting in inventive power; in occasional situations that 
are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character ; 
but they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by 
turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much 
by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of 
motives and states of mind, interspersed with the author's 
reflections. The wild improbabilities of plot and the un- 
natural and even monstrous developments of character are 
in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of 
the language ; the conversations, when there are any, being 
conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine woman 
was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample 
description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from 
his novel of "Ormond," the leading character in which — 
a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish wicked- 
ness — is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr : 
" Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fas- 
cinating quality. Her features were modified by the most 
transient sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all 
times blushful and bewitching. All those graces of sj-m- 
metry, smoothness, and luster, whicli assemble in the im- 
agination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of 
her natal deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfec- 
tions in the shade, complexion, and hair of this lady." 
But, alas ! " Helena's intellectual deficiencies could not be 
concealed. She was proficient in the elements of no 
science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as dispro- 
portionate with her intellects as with those of the mocking- 



66 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

bird. She had not reasoned on the principles of human 
action, nor examined the structure of society. . . . She 
could not commune in their native dialect Avith the sages of 
Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of nature, 
the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts 
of the external universe, and the substance, modes of oper- 
ation, and ultimate destiny of human intelligence were 
enigmas unsolved and insoluble by her." 

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a 
basis ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, 
"Wieland" (whose father anticipates "Old Krook " in 
Dickens's "Bleak House," by dying of spontaneous com- 
bustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices 
to kill his wife and children ; and the voices turn out to be 
produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of 
the story. Similarly in "Edgar Huntley," the plot turns 
upon the phenomena of sleep-walking. Brown had the 
good sense to place the scene of his romances in his own 
country, and the only passages in them which have now a 
living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery 
in " Edgar Huntley," and his graphic account in " Arthur 
Mervyn " of the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 
1793. Shelley was an admirer of Brown, and his experi- 
ments in prose fiction, such as " Zastrozzi " and "St. 
Irvyne the Rosicrucian," are of the same abnormal and 
speculative type. 

Another book which falls within this period was the 
Journal, 1774, of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, 
which has received the highest praise from Channing, 
Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings of 
John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the 
early Quakers." The charm of this journal resides in its 
singular sweetness aud innocence of feeling, the "deep 
inward stillness" peculiar to the people called Quakers. 



The Bevolutioyiary Period. 67 

Apart from his constant use of certain phrases pecuhar to 
the Friends, Woohnan's EngUsh is also remarkably grace- 
ful and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely 
sincere, and tender and humble in its sincerity. When 
not working at his trade as a tailor Woolman spent his 
time in visiting and ministering to the monthly, quarterly, 
and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on horseback to 
their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia 
and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far 
as Boston and Nantucket. He was under a "concern" 
and a "heavy exercise" touching the keeping of slaves, 
and by his writing and speaking did much to influence the 
Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to all 
the wretched and oppressed ; to sailors, and to the Indians 
in particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made 
to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of 
western Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, 
on the Susquehanna. Some of the scruples which Wool- 
man felt, and the quaint naivete with which he expresses 
them, may make the modern reader smile, but the smile 
will be very close to a tear. Thus, when in England — 
where he died in 1772 — he would not ride nor send a letter 
by mail-coach, because the poor postboys were compelled 
to ride long stages in winter nights, and were sometimes 
frozen to death. " So great is the hurry in the spirit of this 
world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to gain 
wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." 
Again, having reflected that war was caused by luxury in 
dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, 
and he got and wore a hat of the natural color of the 
fur. "In attending meetings this singularity was a trial 
to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from 
what motives I wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those 
who spoke with me I generally informed, in a few words, 



68 Initial Studies in American Lettees. 

that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will." 

1. "Representative American Orations." Edited by Alex- 
ander Johnston. New York : 1884. 

2. '' The Federalist." New York : 1863. 

3. Thomas Jefferson : ** Notes on Virginia." Boston: 
1829. 

4. Timothy Dwight : " Travels in New England and 
New York." New Haven : 1821. 

5. John Trumbull : "McFingal." Trumbull's Poetical 
Works. Hartford : 1820. 

6. Joel Barlow : " Hasty Pudding." Francis Hopkin- 
soN : "Modern Learning." Philip Freneau : "Indian 
Student," "Indian Burying-Ground," "White Honey- 
suckle." Vol. I. of Duyckinck's " Cyclopedia of American 
Literature." New York : 1866. 

7. Charles Brockden Brown: "Arthur Mervyn." 
Boston : 1827. 

8. " The Journal of John Woolman." With an Introduc- 
tion by John G. Whittier. Boston : 1871. 

9. Charles F. Richardson: "American Literature." 
New York : 1887. 

10. John Nichol : "American Literature." Edinburgh : 
1882. 



CHAPTER III. 

The Era of National Expansion— 1815-1837. 

The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order 
must here be abandoned. About all the American litera- 
ture in existence that is of any value as literature is the 
product of the past three quarters of a century, and the 
men who produced it, though older or j^ounger, were still 
contemporaries. Irving's "Knickerbocker's History of 
New York," 1809, was published within the recollection of 
some yet living, and the venerable poet Richard H. Dana 
— Irving's junior by only four years — survived to 1879, 
when the youngest of the generation of writers that now 
occupy public attention had already won their spurs. Bry- 
ant, whose " Thanatopsis " was printed in 1816, lived down 
to 1878. He saw the beginnings of our national literature, 
and he saw almost as much of the latest phase of it as we 
see to-day in this year 1895. Still, even within the limits 
of a single lifetime, there have been progress and change. 
And so, while it will happen that the consideration of 
writers, a part of whose work falls between the dates at 
the head of this chapter, may be postponed to subsequent 
chapters, we may in a general way follow the sequence of 
time. 

The period between the close of the second war with 
England, in 1815, and the great financial crash of 1837 has 
been called in language attributed to President Monroe, 
"the era of good feeling." It was a time of peace and 
prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid exten- 

69 



70 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

sion of territory. The new nation was entering upon its 
vast estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny-. 
Tlie iDeace witli Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian 
Indians and the other tribes in alliance with England, had 
opened up the Northwest to settlement. Ohio had been 
admitted as a state in 1802 ; but at the time of President 
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand 
inhabitants, and half of the state was unsettled. The Ohio 
River flowed for most of its course through an unbroken 
wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. Hitherto the emi- 
gration to the West had been sporadic ; now it took on the 
dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. 
This movement was stimulated in New England by the 
cold summer of 1816 and the late spring of 1817, which 
produced a scarcity of food that amounted in parts of the 
interior to a veritable famine. All through this period 
sounded the ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his 
log-cabin, and the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant- 
wagon over the primitive highways which crossed the 
AUeghenies or followed the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. 
Goodrich, known in letters as " Peter Parley," in his 
"Recollections of a Lifetime," 1856, describes the part of 
the movement which he had witnessed as a boy in Fair- 
field County, Connecticut: "I remember very well the 
tide of emigration through Connecticut, on its way to the 
West, during the summer of 1817. Some persons went in 
covered wagons — frequently a family consisting of father, 
mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast, — 
some on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, 
with kettles, gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the 
family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and Webster's 
Spelling-book — the lares and penates of the household. 
Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of ten 
miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in 



The Era of National Expansion, 71 

a state of poverty, and begged their way as they went. 
Some died before they reached the expected Canaan ; many 
perished after their arrival from fatigue and privation ; and 
others from the fever and ague, which was then certain to 
attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that I 
published a small tract entitled ' 'Tother Side of Ohio ' — 
that is, the other view, in contrast to the popular notion 
that it was the paradise of the world. It was written by 
Dr. Hand, a talented young physician of Berlin, who had 
made a visit to the West about these days. It consisted 
mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and 
incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads 
over the AUeghenies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, 
were then rude, steep, and dangerous, and some of the 
more precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with the 
carcasses of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which had made 
shipwreck in their perilous descents." 

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the 
spirit of that time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful 
and a light-hearted one. 

" Westward the course of empire takes its way," 
runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. 
The New Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve 
went there to better themselves ; and their children found 
themselves the owners of broad acres of virgin soil in place 
of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire and Litchfield. 
There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free life of the 
frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The life 
of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky — that "dark 
and bloody ground," — is a genuine romance. Hardly less 
picturesque was the old river life of the Ohio boatmen, 
before the coming of steam banished their queer craft from 
the water. Between 1810 and 1840 the center of popula- 
tion in the United States had moved from the Potomac to 



72 Initial Studies in American Lettei^. 

the neighborhood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the 
population itself had increased from seven to seventeen 
millions. The gain was made partly in the East and 
South, but the general drift was westward. During the 
years now under review the following new states were ad- 
mitted in the order named : Indiana, MississijDpi, Illinois, 
Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan. Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee had been made states in the last years 
of the eighteenth century, and Louisiana— acquired by 
purchase from France— in 1812. 

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of 
wilderness behind them. They took up first the rich bot- 
tom-lands along the river courses, the Ohio and Miami and 
Licking, and later the valleys of the Mississippi and Miss- 
ouri and the shores of the Great Lakes. But there still re- 
mained backwoods in New York and Pennsylvania, though 
the cities of New York and Philadelphia had each a popu- 
lation of more than one hundred thousand in 1815. When 
the Erie Canal was opened, in 1825, it ran through a primi- 
tive forest. N. P. Willis, who went by canal to Buffalo and 
Niagara in 1827, describes the houses and stores at Roches- 
ter as standing among the burnt stumps left by the first 
settlers. In the same year that saw the opening of this 
great waterway, the Indian tribes, numbering now about 
one hundred and thirty thousand souls, were moved across 
the Mississippi. Their power had been broken by General 
Harrison's victory over Tecumseh at the battle of Tippe- 
canoe, in 1811, and they were in fact mere remnants and 
fragments of the race which had hung upon the skirts of 
civilization and disputed the advance of the white man for 
two centuries. It was not until some years later than this 
that railroads began to take an important share in opening 
up new country. 

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine 



The Era of National Expansion. 



anticipation which characterized American thought at this 
time, the picturesque contrasts to be seen in each mushroom, 
town where civiUzation was encroaching on the raw edge of 
the wilderness — all these found expression, not only in such 
well-known books as Cooper's "Pioneers," 1823, and Irving's 
"Tour on the Prairies," 1835, but in the minor literature 
which is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, 
but for the light that it throws on the history of national 
development : in such books as Paulding's story of "West- 
ward Ho !" and his poem, " The Backwoodsman," 1818 ; or 
as Timothy Flint's "Recollections," 1826, and his "Geog- 
raphy and History of the Mississippi Valley," 1827. It 
was not an age of great books, but it was an age of large 
ideas and expanding prospects. The new consciousness of 
empire uttered itself hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, 
"spread-eagleism," and other noisy forms of patriotic 
exultation ; but it was thoroughly democratic and Ameri- 
can. Though literature — or at least the best literature of 
the time — was not yet emancipated from English models, 
thought and life, at any rate, were no longer a bondage — 
no longer provincial. And it is significant that the party 
in ofRce during these years was the Democratic, the party 
which had broken most completely with conservative tra- 
ditions. The famous " Monroe doctrine " was a pronuncia- 
mento of this aggressive democracy, and though the 
Federalists returned to power for a single term, under John 
Quincy Adams (1825-29), Andrew Jackson received the 
largest number of electoral votes, and Adams was only 
chosen by the House of Representatives in the absence of a 
majority vote for any one candidate. At the close of his 
term, "Old Hickory," the hero of the people, the most 
characteristically democratic of our presidents, and the 
first backwoodsman who entered the White House, was 
borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm. 



74 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

We have now arrived at the time when American litera- 
ture, in the liigher and stricter sense of tlie term, really be- 
gan to have an existence. S. G. Goodrich, w^ho settled at 
Hartford as a bookseller and j)ublisher in 1818, says, in his 
"Recollections": "About this time I began to think of 
trying to bring out original American works. . . . The 
general impression was that we had not, and could not 
have, a literature. It was the precise point at which 
Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter taunt in the Edin- 
burgh Bevieiv^ ' Who reads an American book ? ' . . It 
was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a 
bookseller to undertake American works." Washington 
Irving (1783-1859) was the first American author whose 
books, as books, obtained recognition abroad ; whose name 
was thought worthy of mention beside the names of 
English contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and 
Coleridge. He was also the first American writer whose 
writings are still read for their own sake. We read 
Mather's "Magnalia" and Franklin's "Autobiography" 
and Trumbull's "McFingal" — if we read them at all — as 
history, and to learn about the times or the men. But we 
read " The Sketch Book " and " Knickerbocker's History of 
New York" and "The Conquest of Granada" for them- 
selves and for the pleasure that they give as pieces of liter- 
ary art. 

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a 
more cosmopolitan standard to the works of American 
writers, and may disregard man 3^ a minor author whose 
productions would have cut some figure had they come to 
light amid the poverty of our colonial age. Hundreds of 
these forgotten names, with specimens of their unread 
writings, are consigned to a limbo of immortality in the 
pages of Duyckinck's " Cyclopedia" and of Gris wold's 
"Poets of America" and "Prose Writers of America." 



The Era of National Expansion. 



We may select here for special mention, and as most repre- 
sentative of the thought of their time, the names of Irving, 
Cooper, AVebster, and Channing. 

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could 
recall no other government in this country than the gov- 
ernment of the United States, and to whom the Revolu- 
tionary War was but a tradition. Born in the very year 
of the peace, it was a part of Irving's mission, by the sym- 
pathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recog- 
nition which he won in both countries, to allay the 
soreness which the second war, of 1812-15, had left between 
England and America. He was well fitted for the task of 
mediator. Conservative by nature, early drawn to the ven- 
erable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in 
his tastes, with a preference for the past and its historic as- 
sociations, which, even in young America, led him to invest 
the Hudson and the region about New York with a legend- 
ary interest, he wrote of American themes in an English 
fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow 
attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old 
England. He lived in both countries, and loved them 
both ; and it is hard to say whether Irving is more of an 
English or of an American writer. His first visit to 
Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years. From 1815 
to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his "domicile," 
as the lawyers say, during these seventeen years was really 
in England, though a portion of his time was spent upon 
the Continent, and several successive years in Spain, where 
he engaged upon the " Life of Columbus," " The Conquest 
of Granada," the "Companions of Columbus," and " The 
Alhambra," all published between 1828 and 1832. From 
1842 to 1846 he was again in Spain as American minister at 
Madrid. 



Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His 



76 Initial Studies in AmeiHcan Letters. 

boyish letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 
1802 to his brother's newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, 
were, like Franklin's " Busybody," close inaitations of the 
"Spectator." To the same family belonged his "Salma- 
gundi " papers, 1807, a series of town satires on New York 
society, written in conjunction with his brother William 
and with James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and 
sketches which compose " The Sketch Book " were written 
in England, and published in America, in periodical num- 
bers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some respects his best 
book, he still maintained that attitude of observation and 
spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a 
motto taken from Burton : "I have no wife nor children, 
good or bad, to provide for — a mere spectator of other men's 
fortunes," etc. ; and " The Author's Account of Himself" 
began in true Addisonian fashion : "I was always fond of 
visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and 
manners." 

But though never violently " American," like some later 
writers who have consciously sought to throw off the tram- 
mels of English tradition, Irving was in a real way orig- 
inal. His most distinct addition to our national literature 
was in his creation of what has been called " the Knicker- 
bocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary 
purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about 
the romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Hig- 
ginson, in his "History of the United States," tells how 
" Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing up that river in 1786, when 
Irving was a child three years old, records that the captain 
of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or traditional, 
for every scene, ' and not a mountain reared its head un- 
connected with some marvelous story.' " The material thus 
at hand Irving shaped into his "Knickerbocker's History 
of New York," into the immortal story of "Rip Van 



The Era of National Expansion. 



Winkle " and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow " (both pub- 
lished in " The Sketch Book"), and into later additions to 
the same realm of fiction, such as " Dolph Heyliger" (in 
"Bracebridge Hall"), the "Money Diggers," ''Wolfert 
Webber," and ''Kidd the Pirate" (in the "Tales of a 
Traveler "), and some of the miscellanies from the Knieker- 
bocker Magazine, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the 
title of " Wolfert's Roost." 

The book which made Irving's reputation was his 
" Knickerbocker's History of New York," 1809, a burlesque 
chronicle, making fun of the old Dutch settlers of New 
Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and now some- 
what threadbare device,* to a little old gentleman named 
Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into 
the editor's hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the 
New York Historical Society, and it is said to have been 
quoted, as authentic history, by a certain German scholar 
named Goeller, in a note on a passage in Thucydides. This 
story, though well vouched, is hard of belief; for " Knicker- 
bocker," though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave 
irony of Swift in his " Modest Proposal " or of Defoe in his 
"Short Way with Dissenters." Its mock-heroic intention 
is as transparent as in Fielding's parodies of Homer, which 
it somewhat resembles, particularly in the delightfully ab- 
surd description of the mustering of the clans under Peter 
Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Christina. 
"Knickerbocker's History of New York" was a real ad- 
dition to the comic literature of the world, a work of genu- 
ine humor, original and vital. Walter Scott said that it 
reminded him closely of Swift, and had touches resembling 
Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for Irving's little mas- 
terpiece a place beside " Gulliver's Travels " and " Tristram 

* Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, in *' Sartor 
Resartus," the author of the tamous " Clothes Philosophy." 



78 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Shaudy." But it was, at least, the first American book in 
the lighter departments of literature which needed no 
apology and stood squarely on its own legs. It was writ- 
ten, too, at just the right time. Although New Amsterdam 
had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its 
first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still 
upon it when Irviog was a boy. The descendants of the 
Dutch families formed a definite element not only in Man- 
hattan, but all up along the kills of the Hudson, at Albany, 
at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at Hoboken, and 
Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a 
ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial 
town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all 
national characteristics were blended together, and a tide 
of immigration from Europe and New England flowed 
over the old landmarks and obliterated them utterly. 

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen 
the literary possibilities of their early history it must be 
acknowledged that with moderate American life he had 
little sympathy. He hated politics, and in the restless 
democratic movement of the time, as we have described it, 
he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid gentle- 
man, with his distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no 
liking for the Puritans or for their descendants, the New 
England Yankees, if we may judge from his sketch of 
Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." His 
genius was retrospective, and his imagination, like Scott's, 
was the historic imagination. In crude America his fancy 
took refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, in 
"survivals" like the Knickerbocker Dutch and the Aca- 
dian peasants, whose isolated communities on the lower 
Mississippi he visited and described. He turned naturally 
to the ripe civilization of the Old World. He was our first 
picturesque tourist, the first "American in Europe." He 



The Era of National Expansion. 79 

rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, quiet land- 
scapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, and 
rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction. With 
pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages of 
''The Sketch Book" and "Bracebridge Hall," 1822. 
Delightful as are these English sketches, in which the 
author conducts his reader to Windsor Castle, or Stratford- 
on-Avon, or the Boap^s Head Tavern, or sits beside him on 
the box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with him 
the Yule-tide cheer at the ancient English country-house, 
their interest has somewhat faded. The pathos of " The 
Broken Heart " and " The Pride of the Village," the mild 
satire of "The Art of Book-Making," the rather obvious 
reflections in " Westminster Abbey " are not exactly to the 
taste of this generation. They are the literature of leisure 
and retrospection ; and already Irving's gentle elaboration, 
the refined and slightly artificial beauty of his style, and 
his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have 
begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous 
and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little 
roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his 
pictures of life. There is, for instance, something a little 
irritating in the old-fashioned courtliness of his manner 
toward women ; and one reads with a certain impatience 
smoothly punctuated passages like the following: "As 
the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the 
oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the 
hardy plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it 
with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered 
boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Providence that 
woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of 
man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace 
when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into 
the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting 



80 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

the drooping head and binding np tlie broken heart." 
Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagi- 
nation sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently 
acute to support those two main qualities, but inadequate 
to the service of strong passion or subtle thinking, though 
his pathos, indeed, sometimes reached intensity. His 
humor was always delicate and kindly ; his sentiment 
never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was 
graceful and elegant — too elegant, perhaps ; and, in his 
modesty, he attributed the success of his books in England 
to the astonishment of Englishmen that an American 
could write good English. 

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer 
and richer field for his fancy to work upon. He had not 
the analytic and philosophical mind of a great historian, 
and the merits of his " Conquest of Granada " and " Life 
of Columbus " are rather belletristisch than scientific. But 
he brought to these undertakings the same eager love of 
the romantic past which had determined the character of 
his writings in America and England, and the result — 
whether we call it history or romance — is at all events 
charming as literature. His " Life of Washington " — com- 
pleted in 1859 — was his magnum opus, and is accepted as 
standard authority. " Mahomet and His Successors," 1850, 
was comparatively a failure. But of all Irving's biogra- 
phies his "Life of Oliver Goldsmith," 1849, Was the most 
spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it 
upon himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and 
loving sympathy with his subject, and it is, therefore, one 
of the choicest literary memoirs in the language. 

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the re- 
cipient of almost national honors. He had received the 
medal of the Royal Society of Literature and the degree of 
D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had made American 



The Era of National Expansion. 81 

literature known and respected abroad. In his modest 
home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over whieli 
he had been tlie first to throw the witchery of poetry and 
romance, he was attended to tlie last by the admiring 
affection of his countrymen. He had the love and praises 
of the foremost English writers of his own generation and 
the generation which followed — of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, 
Thackeray, and Dickens, some of whom had been among 
his personal friends. He is not the greatest of American 
authors, but the influence of his writings is sweet and 
wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first 
American man of letters who made himself heard in Eu- 
rope should have been in all particulars a gentleman. 

Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, 
were a number of authors who resided in the city of New 
York, and who are known as the Knickerbocker writers, 
perhaps because they were contributors to the Kaicker- 
hocker Magazine, One of these was James K. Paulding, a 
connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the 
"Salmagundi " papers. Paulding became secretary of the 
navy under Van Buren, and lived down to the year 1860. 
He was a voluminous author, but his writings had no 
power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with the 
possible exception of his novel, " The Dutchman's Fire- 
side," 1831. 

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, 
a young poet of great promise, who died in 1820, at the age 
of twenty-five. Drake's patriotic lyric, " The American 
Flag," is certainly the most spirited thing of the kind in 
our poetic literature, and greatly superior to such national 
anthems as "Hail Columbia" and "The Star-Spangled 
Banner." His " Culprit Fa^^,'' published in 1819, was the 
best poem that had yet appeared in America, if we except 
Bryant's " Thanatopsis," which was three years the elder. 



82 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" The Culprit Fay " was a fairy story, in which, following 
Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of 
poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe 
said that the poem was fanciful rather than imaginative ; 
but it is prettily and even brilliantly fanciful, and has main- 
tained its popularity to the i^resent time. Such verse as 
the following— which seems to show that Drake had been 
reading Coleridge's " Christabel," published three years 
before — was something new in American poetry : 

" The winds are whist and the owl is still, 

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, 
And naught is heard on the lonely hill 
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill 

Of the gauze-winged katydid. 
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, 

"Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings 
Ever a note of wail and woe, 

Till morning spreads her rosy wings. 
And earth and sky in her glances glow." 

Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American 
bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, al- 
though the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home 
on the banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been 
kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful 
elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first 
stanza of which is universally known : 

" Green be the turf above thee, 
Friend of my better days ; 
None knew thee but to love thee. 
Nor named thee but to praise." 

Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he 
retired in 1849, and resided there till his death in 1867. But 
his literary career is identified with New York. He was 
associated with Drake in writing the "Croaker Papers," 
a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed in 
1814 to the Evening Post. These were of a merely local and 



The Era of National Expansion. 



temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, "Marco Boz- 
zaris " — though declaimed until it has become hackneyed — 
gives him a sure title to remembrance ; and his " Alnwick 
(/astle," a monody, half serious and half playful, on the 
contrast between feudal associations and modern life, has 
much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's 
best vers de societB. 

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore 
Cooper (1789-1851), the first American novelist of distinc- 
tion, and, if a popularity which has endured for nearly 
three quarters of a century is any test, still the most suc- 
cessful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more in- 
tensely American than Irving, and his books reached an 
even wider public. " They are published as soon as he pro- 
duces them," said Morse, the electrician, in 1833, " in 
thirty-four different places in Europe. They have been 
seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey 
and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at 
Isi^ahan." Cooper wrote altogether too much; he pub- 
lished, besides his fictions, a *' Naval History of the United 
States," a series of naval biographies, works of travel, and 
a great deal of controversial matter. He wrote over thirty 
novels, the greater part of which are little better than trash, 
and tedious trash at that. This is especially true of his 
tendenz novels and his novels of society. He was a man of 
strongly marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive 
to criticism, and abounding in prejudices. He was embit- 
tered by the scurrilous attacks made upon him by a portion 
of the American press, and spent a great deal of time and 
energy in conducting libel suits against the newspapers. 
In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack 
upon the abuses and follies of American life. Nearly all of 
his novels written with this design are worthless. Nor 
was Cooper well equipped by nature and temperament for 



84 Initial Studies in American Letterfi. 

depicting character and jiassion in social life. Even in his 
best romances his heroines and his "leading juveniles" — 
to borrow a term from the amateur stage — are insipid and 
conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not 
of a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, 
unlike Irving, he had no stjie. 

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the inven- 
tion of incidents and plots, in a power of narrative and de- 
scription in tales of wild adventure which keeps the reader 
in breathless excitement to the end of the book. He orig- 
inated the novel of the sea and the novel of the wilderness. 
He created the Indian of literature, and in this, his peculiar 
field, although he has had countless imitators, he has had 
no equals. Cooper's experiences had prepared him well for 
the kingship of this new realm in the world of fiction. 
His childhood was passed on the borders of Otsego Lake, 
when central New York was still a wilderness, with bound- 
less forests stretching westward, broken only here and there 
by the clearings of the pioneers. He was taken from col- 
lege (Yale) when still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant 
vessel, before the mast. Afterward he entered the navy 
and did duty on the high seas and upon Lake Ontario, 
then surrounded by virgin forests. He married and re- 
signed his commission in 1811, just before the outbreak of 
the war with England, so that he missed the opportunity 
of seeing active service in any of those engagements on the 
ocean and our great lakes which were so glorious to 
American arms. But he always retained an active interest 
in naval affairs. 

His first successful novel was " The Spy," 1821, a tale of 
the Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in 
Westchester County, N. Y., where the author was then re- 
siding. The hero of this story, Harvey Birch, was one of the 
most skilfully drawn figures on his canvas. In 1823 he pub- 



The Era of National Ux2Jansion. 85 

lished "The Pioneers," a work somewhat overladen with 
description, in wliich he drew for material upon his boyish 
recollections of frontier life at Cooperstown. This was the 
first of a series of five romances known as the " Leather- 
stocking Tales." The others were "The Last of the 
Mohicans," 1826 ; "- The Prairie," 1827 ; " The Pathfinder," 
1840 ; and " The Deerslayer," 1841. The hero of this series, 
Natty Bumpo, or " Leatherstocking," was Cooper's one 
great creation in the sj)here of character, his most original 
addition to the literature of the world in the way of a new 
human type. This backwoods philosopher — to the concep- 
tion of whom the historic exploits of Daniel Boone perhaps 
supplied some hints ; unschooled, but moved by noble im- 
pulses and a natural sense of piety and justice ; passion- 
ately attached to the wilderness, and following its westering 
edge even unto the j)rairies — this man of the woods was the 
first real American in fiction. Hardly less individual and 
vital were the various types of Indian character, in 
Chingachgook, Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors. In- 
ferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat 
roughly drawn, were the waifs and strays of civilization, 
whom duty, or the hope of gain, or the love of adventure, 
or the outlawry of crime had driven to the wilderness — the 
solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman, the offi- 
cers and men of outpost garrisons. Whether Cooper's In- 
dian was the real being, or an idealized and rather melo- 
dramatic version of the truth, has been a subject of dispute. 
However this be, he has taken his place in the domain of 
art, and it is safe to say that his standing there is secure. 
No boy will ever give him up. 

Equally good with the " Leatherstocking " novels, and 
equally national, were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least 
the best two of them—" The Pilot," 1823, founded upon the 
daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and " The Red Rover," 



Initial Studies in American Letters. 



1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he has had 
to admit competitors ; and Britannia, who rules the waves 
in song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of 
nautical fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and 
others. Though Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper 
needs of the heart and the imagination, their appeal to the 
universal love of a story is perennial. We devour them 
when we are boys, and if we do not often return to them 
when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have 
read them before, and " know the ending," They are good 
yarns for the forecastle and the camp-fire ; and the scholar 
in his study, though he may put " The Deerslayer " or " The 
Last of the Mohicans " away on the top shelf, will take it 
down now and again, and sit up half the night over it. 

Before dismissing the belles-lettres writings of this period, 
mention should be made of a few poems of the fugitive 
kind which seem to have taken a permanent place in pop- 
ular regard. John Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, 
a wandering actor and playwright, who died American 
consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Gar- 
den Theater an opera, entitled '* Clari," the libretto of 
which included the now famous song of "Home, Sweet 
Home." Its literary pretensions were of the humblest 
kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo- 
Saxon heart in its tenderest spot, and, being happily 
married to a plaintive air, was sold by the hundred thou- 
sand, and is evidently destined to be sung forever. A like 
success has attended "The Old Oaken Bucket," composed 
by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from Massa- 
chusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were 
issued in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard 
Henry Wilde, an Irishman by birth, a gentleman of schol- 
arly tastes and accomplishments, who wrote a great deal on 
Italian literature, and sat for several terms in Congress as 



The Era of Natlonat Expansion. 8l 



representative of the state of Georgia, was the author of the 
favorite song, *' My Life is Like the Summer Rose." An- 
other southerner, and a member of a distinguished south- 
ern family, was Edward Coate Pinkney, who served nine 
years in the navy, and died in 1828 at the age of twenty- 
six, having published in 1825 a small volume of lyrical 
poems which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that 
time in American verse. One of these, "A Health," be- 
ginning : 

" I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone," 
though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has 
rare beauty of thought and expression. 

John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United 
States (1825-29), was a man of culture and literary tastes. 
He published his lectures on rhetoric, delivered during his 
tenure of the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-9 ; 
he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited since 
his death in 1848 ; and among his experiments in poetry is 
one of considerable merit, entitled "The Wants of Man," 
an ironical sermon on Goldsmith's text : 

" Man wants but little here below, 
Nor wants that little long." 

As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. 
Holmes's ''Contentment," so the very popular ballad, ''Old 
Grimes," written about 1818 by Albert Gorton Greene, an 
undergraduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, is in 
some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly pathetic 
"Last Leaf." 

The political literature and pubUc oratory of the United 
States during this period, although not absolutely of less 
importance than that which preceded and followed the 
Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the con- 
stitution, demands less relative attention in a history of 



88 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

literature by reason of the growth of other departments of 
thought. The age was a political one, but no longer exclu- 
sively political. The debates of the time centered about 
the question of "State Rights," and the main forum of 
discussion was the old Senate chamber, then made illus- 
trious by tlie presence of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. 
The slavery question, which had threatened trouble, was 
put off for a while by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, 
only to break out more fiercely in the debates on the 
Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. 
Meanwhile the abolition movement had been transferred 
to the press and the platform. Garrison started his 
Liberator in 1830, and the Antislavery Society was founded 
in 1833. The AVhig party, which had inherited the consti- 
tutional principles of the old Federal partj^, advocated 
internal improvements at national expense and a high 
protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was 
strongest at the South, opposed those views, and in 1832 
South Carolina claimed the right to "nullify" the tariff 
imposed by the general government. The leader of this 
party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, 
who in his speech in the United States Senate, on 
February 13, 1832, on Nullification and the Force Bill, set 
forth most authoritatively the "Carolina doctrine." Cal- 
houn was a great debater, but hardly a great orator. His 
speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict consti- 
tutionalist, severely logical, and with a sincere conviction 
in the soundness of his case. Their language is free from 
bad rhetoric ; the reasoning is cogent, but there is an 
absence of emotion and imagination ; they contain few 
quotable things, and no passages of commanding elo- 
quence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. 
They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of 
Henry Clay, of Kentuckj^, the leader of the Whigs, whose 



Tlie Era of National Expansion. 89 

persuasive oratory is a matter of tradition, disappoint in 
tlie reading. Tlie fire has gone out of tliem, 

Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of American 
forensic orators, if, indeed, lie be not the greatest of all 
orators who have used the English tongue. Webster's 
speeches are of the kind that have power to move after the 
voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the passion 
in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting 
than the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Web- 
ster's speeches, as of all speeches, that they are known to 
posterity more by single brilliant passages than as wholes. 
In oratory the occasion is of the essence of the thing, and 
only those parts of an address which are permanent and 
universal in their appeal take their place in literature. 
But of such detachable passages there are happily many in 
Webster's orations. One great thought underlay all his 
public life, the thought of the Union— of American nation- 
ality. What in Hamilton had been a principle of political 
philosophy had become in Webster a passionate conviction. 
The Union was his idol, and he was intolerant of any 
faction which threatened it from any quarter, w^hether the 
nullifiers of South Carolina or the abolitionists of the 
North. It is this thought which gives grandeur and ele- 
vation to all his utterances, and especially to the wonderful 
peroration of his " Eeply to Hayne," on Mr. Foot's reso- 
lution touching the sale of the public lands, delivered in 
the Senate on January 26, 1830, whosQ closing words, ** Lib- 
erty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable," 
became the rallying cry of a great cause. Similar in senti- 
ment was his famous speech of March 7, 1850, "On the 
Constitution and the Union," which gave so much offense 
to the extreme Antislavery party, who held with Garrison 
that a constitution which protected slavery was "a league 
with death and a covenant with hell." It is not claiming too 



90 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

much for Webster to assert that the sentences of these and 
other speeches, memorized and declaimed by thousands of 
schoolboys throughout the North, did as much as any 
single influence to train up a generation in hatred of seces- 
sion, and to send into the fields of the Civil War armies of 
men animated with the stern resolution to fight until the 
last drop of blood was shed, rather than allow the Union to 
be dissolved. 

The figure of this great senator is one of the most impos- 
ing in American annals. The masculine force of his per- 
sonality impressed itself upon men of widely differing 
natures — upon the unworldly Emerson, and upon the cap- 
tious Carlyle, whose respect was not willingly accorded to 
any contemporary, much less to a representative of Ameri- 
can democracy. Webster's looks and manner were charac- 
teristic. His form was massive, his skull and jaw solid, the 
under-lip projecting, and the mouth firmly and grimly 
shut ; his complexion was swarthy, and his black, deep-set 
eyes, under shaggy brows, glowed with a smoldering fire. 
He was rather silent in society ; his delivery in debate was 
grave and weighty, rather than fervid. His oratory was 
massive, and sometimes even ponderous. It may be ques- 
tioned whether an American orator of to-day, with intel- 
lectual abilities equal to Webster's — if such a one there 
were — would permit himself the use of sonorous and elabo- 
rate pictures like the famous period which follows : "On 
this question of principle, while actual suflTering was yet 
afar ofl^, they raised their flag against a power to which, for 
purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the 
height of her glory, is not to be compared — a power which 
has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her 
possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, 
following the sun and keeping company with the hours, 
circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain 



The Era of National Expansion. 91 

of the martial airs of England." The secret of this kind 
of oratory has been lost. The present generation distrusts 
rhetorical ornament and likes something swifter, simpler, 
and more familiar in its speakers. But everything in dec- 
lamation of the sort, depends upon the way in which it is 
done. Webster did it supremely well ; a smaller man 
would merely have made buncombe of it. 

Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was 
Rufus Choate, an eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a 
United States senator from Massachusetts. Some of his 
speeches, though excessively rhetorical, have literary qual- 
ity, and are nearly as effective in print as Webster's own. 
Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in his 
time was successively professor in Harvard College, Uni- 
tarian minister in Boston, editor of the Noi^th America?! 
Review, member of both houses of Congress, minister to 
England, governor of his state, and president of Harvard, 
was a speaker of great finish and elegance. His addresses 
were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and 
were rather lectures and Phi Beta Kappa prolusions than 
speeches. Everett was an instance of careful culture be- 
stowed on a soil of no very great natural richness. It is 
doubtful whether his classical orations on Washington, the 
Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes, 
have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them 
much longer in recollection. 

New England, during these years, did not take that lead- 
ing part in the purely literary development of the country 
which it afterward assumed. It had no names to match 
against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and Halleck — 
slender as was their performance in point of quantity — 
were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, 
whose " Shakespeare Ode," delivered at the Boston theater 
in 1823, was locally famous ; and Richard Henry Dana, 



92 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

whose longish narrative poem " The Buccaneer," 1827, once 
had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a 
serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of 
highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default 
of great geniuses. The North American Review^ estab- 
lished in 1815, though it has been wittily described as 
"ponderously revolving through space" for a few years 
after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, 
but was scholarly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be 
sure, was a Massachusetts man — as were Everett and 
Choate — but his triumphs were won in the wider field of 
national politics. There was, however, a movement at 
this time, in the intellectual life of Boston and eastern 
Massachusetts, which, though not immediately contribu- 
tory to the finer kinds of literature, prepared the waj'', by 
its clarifyiug and stimulating influences, for the eminent 
writers of the next generation. This was the Unitarian 
revolt against Puritan orthodoxy, in which William Ellery 
Channing was the principal leader. In a community so 
intensely theological as New England, it was natural 
that any new movement in thought should find its point 
of departure in the churches. Accordingly, the progress- 
ive and democratic spirit of the age, which in other parts 
of the country took other shapes, assumed in Massachu- 
setts the form of " liberal Christianity." Arminianism, 
Socinianism, and other phases of anti-Trinitarian doctrine 
had been latent in some of the Congregational churches of 
Massachusetts for a number of years. But about 1812 the 
heresy broke out openly, and within a few years from that 
date most of the oldest and wealthiest church societies of 
Boston and its vicinity had gone over to Unitarianism, and 
Harvard College had been captured, too. In the contro- 
versy that ensued, and which was carried on in numer- 
ous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, there were 



The Era of National Expansion. 



93 



eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this contro- 
versy was concerned with the theological doctrine of the 
Trinity it has no place in a history of literature. But the 
issue went far beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity 
of human nature against the Calvinistic doctrine of innate 
depravity, and affirmed the rights of human reason and 
man's capacity to judge of God. ''We must start in re- 
ligion from our own souls," he said. And in his " Moral 
ArgumentAgainst Calvinism," 1820, he wrote : " Nothing 
is gained to piety by degrading human nature, for in the 
competency of this nature to know and judge of God all 
piety has its foundation." In opposition to Edwards's doc- 
trine of necessity he emphasized the freedom of the will. 
He maintained that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, 
foreordination, election by grace, and eternal punishment 
were inconsistent with the divine perfection, and made God 
a monster. In Channing's view the great sanction of relig- 
ious truth is the moral sanction, is its agreement with the 
laws of conscience. He was a passionate vindicator of the 
liberty of the individual, not only as against political oppres- 
sion, but against the tyranny of public opinion over thought 
and conscience : " We were made for free action. This alone 
is life, and enters into all that is good and great." This 
jealous love of freedom inspired all that he did and wrote. 
It led him to join the Antislavery party. It expressed 
itself in his elaborate arraignment of Napoleon in the Uni- 
tarian organ, the Christian Examiner, for 1827-28 ; in his 
"Remarks on Associations," and his paper "On the Char- 
acter and Writings of John Milton," 1826. This was his 
most considerable contribution to literary criticism. It 
took for a text Milton's recently discovered "Treatise on 
Christian Doctrine "—the tendency of which was anti- 
Trinitarian— but it began with a general defense of poetry 
against "those who are accustomed to speak of poetry as 



94 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

light reading." This would now seem a somewhat super- 
fluous introduction to an article in any American review. 
But it shows the nature of the milieu through which the 
liberal movement in Boston had to make its way. To re- 
assert the dignity and usefulness of the beautiful arts, was, 
perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts Uni- 
tarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice 
of the Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to 
be softened before polite literature could find a congenial 
atmosphere in New England. In Channing's "Remarks on 
National Literature," reviewing a work published in 1823, 
he asks the question, " Do we possess what may be called a 
national literature?" and answers it, by implication at 
least, in the negative. That we do now possess a national 
literature is in great part due to the influence of Channing 
and his associates, although his own writings, being in the 
main controversial, and of temporary interest, may not take 
rank among the permanent treasures of that literature. 

1. Washington Irving : " Knickerbocker's History 
of New York"; "The Sketch Book"; " Bracebridge 
Hall " ; "Tales of a Traveler " ; " The Alhambra " ; " Life 
of Oliver Goldsmith." 

2. James Fenimore Cooper: "The Spy"; "The 
Pilot" ; " The Red Rover " ; " The Leatherstocking Tales." 

3. Daniel Webster : " Great Speeches and Orations." 

4. William Ellery Channing: "The Character 
and Writings of John Milton " ; " The Life and Character 
of Napoleon Bonaparte" ; " Slavery." [Vols. I. and II. of 
the "Works of William E. Channing." Boston : 1841.] 

5. Joseph Rodman Drake : " The Culprit Fay " ; " The 
American Flag." [" Selected Poems." New York : 1835.] 

6. Fitz-Greene Halleck : " Marco Bozzaris " ; "Aln- 
wick Castle"; "On the Death of Drake." ["Poems." 
New York: 1827.] 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Concord Writers —1837-1861. 

There has been but one movement in the history of the 
American mind which has given to literature a group of 
writers having coherence enough to merit tlie name of a 
school. This was the great humanitarian movement, or 
series of movements, in New England, wliich, beginning 
in tlie Unitarianism of Channing, ran tli rough its later 
phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in 
the antislavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil 
War. The second stage of this intellectual and social revolt 
was transcendentalism, of which Emerson wrote in 1842 : 
" The history of genius and of religion in these times will 
be the history of this tendency." It culminated about 
1840-41 in the establishment of The Dial and the Brook 
Farm Community, although Emerson had given the signal 
a few years before in his little volume entitled "Nature," 
1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard on "The 
American Scholar," 1837, and his address in 1838 before the 
Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson 
(1803-82) was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its 
Mecca ; but the influence of the new ideas was not confined 
to the little group of professed transcendentalists ; it ex- 
tended to all the young writers within reach, who struck 
their roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and 
freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely Em- 
erson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Haw- 
thorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. 

95 



96 Initial Studies in ATneincan Letters. 

Ill its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restate- 
ment of the idealistic philosophy, and an application of its 
beliefs to religion, nature, and life. But in a looser sense, 
and as including the more outward manifestations which 
drew popular attention the most strongly, it was the name 
given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal in- 
quiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth 
decades of this century in America, and especially in New 
England. The movement was contemporary with polit- 
ical revolutions in Europe and with the preaching of many 
novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, 
medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the 
Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, 
Second Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, 
some of whom believed in trances, miracles, and direct rev- 
elations from the divine Spirit ; others in the quick coming 
of Christ, as deduced from the opening of the seals and 
the number of the beasts in the Apocalypse ; and still others 
in the reorganization of society and of the family on a dif- 
ferent basis. New systems of education were tried, sug- 
gested by the writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, 
and others. The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phre- 
nology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had numerous 
followers. In medicine, homeopathy, hydropathy, and 
what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions, "rnade many 
disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines 
of Graham and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal 
food, as injurious not only to health but to a finer spiritu- 
ality. Not a few refused to vote or pay taxes. The writ- 
ings of Fourier and Saint-Simon were translated, and so- 
cieties were established where cooperation and a community 
of goods should take the place of selfish competition. 

About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these 
"phalansteries" in America, many of which had their 



The Concord Write?-, 



organs in the shape of weekly or monthl^^ journals, which 
advocated the principle of association. The best known of 
these was probably The Harbinger, the mouthpiece of the 
famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at 
West Roxbury, Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The 
head man of Brook Farm was George Ripley, a Unitarian 
clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in Boston to go 
into the movement, and who after its failure became and 
remained for many years literary editor of the JVew York 
Tribune. Among his associates were Charles A. Dana — 
now the editor of The Sun — Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, and others not unknown to fame. The Har- 
binger, which ran from 1845 to 1849 — two years after the 
break-up of the community, had among its contributors 
many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized 
more or less w^ith the experiment. Of the number were 
Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge, who did so much to in- 
troduce American readers to German literature, J. S. 
Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and 
younger men, like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A 
reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of The Har- 
binger, will find in it some stimulating writing, together 
with a great deal of unintelligible talk about " harmonic 
unity," "love germination," and other matters now fallen 
silent. 

The most important literary result of this experiment 
at " plain living and high thinking," with its queer 
mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne's 
"Blithedale Romance," which has for its background an 
idealized picture of the community life ; whose heroine, 
Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller, and whose hero, 
with his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one- 
idea'd philanthropist that abounded in such an environ- 
ment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in part one of 



98 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

reserve and criticism, an attitude wliicli is apparent in the 
reminiscences of Brooli Farm in liis "American Note 
Bool^s," wlierein lie speal^s witli a certain resentment of 
" Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer," which hooked the 
other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's mind not 
unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself. 

It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the 
air was full of the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with 
philanthropic projects and plaus for the regeneration of the 
universe. The figure of the wild-eyed, long-haired re- 
former—the man with a imnacea— the " crank " of our later 
terminology— became a familiar one. He abounded at non- 
resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace 
societies and of woman's rights associations. The move- 
ment had its grotesque aspects, which Lowell has described 
in his essay on Thoreau. " Bran had its apostles and the 
pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored im- 
promptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious 
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other 
people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the 
spirit. . . . Communities were established where every- 
thing was to be common but common sense." 

This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what 
was then seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile 
products. But some very solid matters have also been pre- 
cipitated, some crystals of poetry, translucent, symmetrical, 
enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disap- 
pointing, |ind the external history of the agitation is a rec- 
ord of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian phi- 
losophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be 
reabsorbed into some form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of 
the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain 
people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances 
of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of tran- 



The Concord Writers. 9^ 



scendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the 
movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit ; 
its moral earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the 
individual conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run 
into grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the same 
relation to the absurder outcroppings of transcendentalism 
that Milton bore to the New Lights, Ranters, Fifth Mon- 
archy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that ming- 
ling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee 
shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, 
inventive, calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee 
has been made sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of 
New England is full of dreams, mysticism, romance ; 

"And in the day of sacrifice, 
When heroes piled the pyre, 
The dismal Massachusetts ice 
Burned more than others' fire." 

The one element which the odd and eccentric develop- 
ments of this movement shared in common with the real 
philosophy of transcendentalism was the rejection of 
authority and the appeal to the private consciousness as the 
sole standard of truth and right. This principle certainly 
lay in the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great 
transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly 
asserted by Channing. Nay, it was the starting-point of 
Puritanism itself, which had drawn away from the cere- 
monial religion of the English Church, and by its Congre- 
gational system had made each church society independent 
in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan ortho- 
doxy in New England had grown rigid and dogmatic it had 
never used the weapons of obscurantism. By encouraging 
education to the utmost, it had shown its willingness to 
submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put into 
the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them. 



100 Initial Studies in Ameincan Letters, 



In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a depart- 
ure from conservative Unitarian ism, as that had been from 
Calvinism. From Edwards to Channing, from Channing 
to Emerson and Theodore Parker, there was a natural and 
logical unfolding ; not logical in the sense that Channing 
accepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their 
conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's 
premises, but in the sense that the rigid pushing out of 
Edwards's premises into their conclusions by himself and 
his followers had brought about a moral reductio ad 
absurdum and a state of opinion against which Channing 
rebelled ; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, 
stopped short in the carrying out of his own' principles. 
Thus the "Channing Unitarians," while denying that 
Christ was God, had held that he was of divine nature, was 
the Son of God, and had existed before he came into the 
world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "vicarious 
sacrifice " they maintained that Christ was a mediator and 
intercessor, and that his supernatural nature was testified 
by miracles. For Parker and Emerson it was easy to take 
the step to the assertion that Christ was a good and great 
man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him more 
fully than any other man known in history ; that it was 
his preaching and example that brought salvation to men, 
and not any special mediation or intercession, and that his 
own words and acts, and not miracles, are the only and the 
sufficient witness to his mission. In the view of the tran- 
scendentalists, Christ was as human as Buddha, Socrates, 
or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the 
"Ethnical Scriptures," or sacred writings of the peoples, 
passages from which were published in the transcendental 
organ, The Dial. 

As against these new views, Channing Unitarianism oc- 
cupied already a conservative position. The Unitarians 



The Concord Writers. 101 

as a body had never been very numerous outside of eastern 
Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New Yorli 
and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, 
as such, was a local one. Ortliodoxy made a sturdy fight 
against the heresy, under leaders like Leonard Woods and 
Moses Stewart, of Andover, and Lyman Beecher, of Con- 
necticut. In the neighboring state of Connecticut, for ex- 
ample, there was until lately, for a period of several years, 
no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a 
church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unita- 
rians claimed, with justice, that their opinions had, to a 
great extent, modified the theology of the orthodox 
churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, 
one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach 
Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the 
atonement ; and the ** progressive orthodoxy " of Andover 
is certainly not the Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of 
Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to the transcendentalists 
that conservative Unitarianism was too negative and " cul- 
tured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of 
the Boston pulpits ; while, contrariwise, the central 
thought of transcendentalism, that the soul has an imme- 
diate connection with God, was pronounced by Dr. Chan- 
ning a " crude speculation." This was the thought of 
Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity 
School, and it was at once made the object of attack by 
conservative Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews 
Norton. The latter, in an address before the same audience, 
on " The Latest Form of Infidelity," said : "Nothing is 
left that can be called Christianity if its miraculous char- 
acter be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no 
direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a 
pamphlet supporting the same side of the question he 
added : '' It is not an intelligible error, but a mere absurd- 



102 Initial Studies in American Lettei^s. 

ity, to maintain tliat we are conscious, or liave an intuitive 
knowledge, of tlie being of God, of our own immortality, 
. . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and Par- 
ker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself 
would never be drawn into controversy. He said that he 
could not argue. He announced truths, his method was 
that of the seer, not of the disputant. 

In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman and 
descended from eight generations of clergymen, had re- 
signed the pastorate of the Second Church of Boston be- 
cause he could not conscientiously administer the sacra- 
ment of the communion — which he regarded as a mere act 
of commemoration — in the sense in which it was under- 
stood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he some- 
times occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his 
life a kind of "lay preacher," he never assumed the pas- 
torate of a church. The representative of transcendental- 
ism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an eloquent 
preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many 
subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. 
Parker was a man of strongly human traits, passionate, 
independent, intensely religious, but intensely radical, who 
made for himself a large personal following. The more 
advanced wing of the Unitarians were called after him, 
" Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to 
" fellowship " with him ; and the large congregation, or 
audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his ser- 
mons, was stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which 
came to hear Parker preach irreligion. 

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New Eng- 
land transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. 
The impulse came from Germany, from the philosophical 
writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from 
the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated 



The Concord Winters. 103 



German thought in England. In Channmg's "Remarks 
on a National Literature," quoted in our last chapter, the 
essayist urged that our scholars should study the authors 
of France and Germany as one means of emancipating 
American letters from a slavish dependence on British lit- 
erature. And, in fact, German literature began, not long 
after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson 
published an American edition of Carlyle's *' Miscellanies," 
including his essays on German writers that had appeared 
in England between 1822 and 1830. In 1838 Ripley began 
to publish "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," 
which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of 
translating and supplying introductions to the matter se- 
lected, he was helped by Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, 
and others who had more or less connection with the tran- 
scendental movement. 

The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his 
lecture on "The Transcendentalist," 1842, is as follows: 
" What is popularly called transcendentalism among us is 
idealism. . . . The idealism of the present day acquired 
the name of transcendental from the use of that term by 
Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of 
Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intel- 
lect which was not previously in the experience of the 
senses, by showing that there was a very important class of 
ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experi- 
ence, but through which experience was acquired ; that 
these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denom- 
inated them transcendental forms." Idealism denies the 
independent existence of matter. Transcendentalism 
claims for the innate ideas of God and the soul a higher 
assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the outside 
world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the 
" noble doubt of idealism." He calls the universe a shade, 



104 Initial Studies in Ametncan Letters. 



a dream, ''this great apparition." " It is a sufficient ac- 
count of tliat appearance we call the world," he wrote in 
"Nature," "that God will teach a human mind, and so 
makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent 
sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, 
house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authen- 
ticity^ of the report of my senses, to know whether the im- 
pressions on me correspond with outlying objects, what 
difference does it make whether Orion is up there in heaven 
or some god paints the image in the firmament of tlie 
soul? " On the other hand, our evidence of the existence 
of God and of our own souls, and our knowledge of right 
and wrong, are immediate, and are independent of the 
senses. We are in direct communication with the "Over- 
soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the back- 
ground of our being— an immensity not possessed, that 
cannot be possessed." "From within or from behind, a 
light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware 
that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is 
'"an influx of the divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb 
of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the 
sea of life." In moods of exultation, and especially in the 
presence of nature, this contact of the individual soul with 
the absolute is felt. "All mean egotism vanishes. I be- 
come a transparent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the 
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me ; I 
am part and particle of God." The existence and attri- 
butes of God are not deducible from history or from nat- 
ural theology, but are thus directly given us in conscious- 
ness. In his essay on " The Transcendentalist " Emerson 
says: "His experience inchnes him to behold the pro- 
cession of facts you call the world as flowing perpetually 
outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself; 
center alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to 



The Concord Writers. 105 



regard all things as having a subjective or relative exist- 
ence—relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of him. 
There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, 
ceases, and God, the cause, begins. We lie open on one 
side to the deej^s of spiritual nature, to the attributes of 
God." 

Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of 
philosophy, is strange to the popular understanding, and 
hence has arisen the complaint of his obscurity. More- 
over, he apprehended and expressed these ideas as a poet, 
in figurative and emotional language, and not as a meta- 
physician, in a formulated statement. His own position in 
relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he 
says of Plato, in his series of sketches entitled "Repre- 
sentative Men," 1850 : " He has not a system. The dearest 
disciples and defenders are at fault. He attempted a theory 
of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self- 
evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that ; 
he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in 
another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many 
students of more formal philosophies, Emerson's meaning 
seems elusive, and he appears to write from temporary 
moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted a rea- 
soned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead 
of writing essays and poems, he might have added one more 
to the number of system-mongers ; but he would not have 
taken that significant place which he occupies in the gen- 
eral literature of the time, nor exerted that wide influence 
upon younger writers which has been one of the stimulat- 
ing forces in American thought. It w^as because Emerson 
was a poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be 
impossible to disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas 
from the body of his writings and to leave the latter to 
stand upon their merits as literature merely. He is the 



106 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

poet of certain high abstractions, and liis religion is central 
to all his work — excepting, perhaps, his *' English Traits," 
1836, an acute study of national characteristics ; and a few 
of his essays and verses, which are independent of any 
particular pliilosophical standpoint. 

When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he made a 
short trip to Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigen- 
puttock and Landor at Florence. On his return he retired 
to the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down 
among his books and his fields, becoming a sort of " glori- 
fied farmer," but issuing frequently from his retirement to 
instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful people at 
Boston and at other points all through the country. Em- 
erson was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner 
was quiet but forcible, his voice of charming quality, and 
his enunciation clean-cut and refined. The sentence was 
his unit in composition. His lectures seemed to begin any- 
where and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of ex- 
quisitely polished sayings rather than continuous dis- 
courses. His printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, 
were first written and delivered as lectures. In 1836 he 
published his first book, "Nature," whicli remains the 
most systematic statement of his philosophy. It opened a 
fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of 
its introduction announced that its author had broken 
with the past. "Why should not we also enjoy an orig- 
inal relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a 
poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, 
and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of 
theirs?" 

It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this 
little book. But the year following its publication the re- 
markable Phi Beta Kappa address at Cambridge, on " The 
American Scholar," electrified the little public of the uni- 



The Concord Writers. 107 



versity. This is described by Lowell as " an event without 
any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be 
always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what 
windows clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of 
foregone dissent!" To Concord came many kindred 
spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic attraction. Thither 
came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born a few 
years before Emerson, whom he outlived ; a quaint and 
benignant figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the 
transcendentalists themselves, and one who lived in un- 
worldly simplicity the life of the soul. Alcott had taught 
school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at Boston on an 
original plan— compelling his scholars, for example, to flog 
him, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging 
themselves. The experiment was successful until his 
" Conversations on the Gospels," in Boston, and his in- 
sistence upon admitting colored children to his benches, 
offended conservative opinion and broke up his school. 
Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He 
believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and 
supported himself for some years by the work of his hands, 
gardening, cutting wood, etc. He traveled into the West 
and elsewhere, holding conversations on philosophy, edu- 
cation, and religion. He set up a little community at the 
village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was rather less 
successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed ** Orphic 
Sayings" to The Dial, which were harder for the exoteric 
to understand than even Emerson's " Brahma," or " The 
Over-soul." 

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most in- 
tellectual woman of her time in America, an eager student 
of Greek and German literature and an ardent seeker after 
the true, the good, and the beautiful. She threw herself 



108 Initial Studies in Atnej'ican Letters. 

into many causes — such as temperance and the higher edu- 
cation of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in 
Boston attracted many " minds " of her own sex. Subse- 
quently, as literary editor of the New York Tribune^ she 
furnished a wider public with reviews and book notices of 
great ability. She took part in the Brook Farm experi- 
ment, and she edited The Dial for a time, contributing to 
it the papers afterward expanded into her most consider- 
able book, " Woman in the Nineteenth Century." In 1846 
she went abroad, and at Rome took part in the revolution- 
ary movement of Mazzini, having charge of one of the 
hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In 
1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Mar- 
quis Ossoli. In 1850 the ship on wliicli she was returning 
to America, with her husband and child, was wrecked on 
Fire Island beach and all three were lost. Margaret Ful- 
ler's collected writings are somewhat disappointing, being 
mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her 
books than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, 
James Freeman Clarke, T. W. Higginson, and others who 
knew her as a personal influence. Her strenuous and 
rather overbearing individuality made an impression not 
altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. 
Lowell introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into 
his " Fable for Critics," and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of 
her, preserved in the biography written by his son, has 
given great offense to her admirers. "Such a determina- 
tion to eat this huge universe!" was Carlyle's character- 
istic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspira- 
tions after perfection. 

To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took 
up his residence there first at the " Old Manse," and after- 
ward at "The Wayside." Though naturally an idealist, 
he said that he came too late to Concord to fall decidedly 



The Concord Writers. 109 



under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in 
little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the 
deep and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his 
own shy genius always jealously guarded its independence 
and resented the too close approaches of an alien mind. 
Among the native disciples of Emerson at Concord the most 
noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and biog- 
rapher, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the 
great Channing. Channing was a contributor to The Dial, 
and he published a volume of poems which elicited a 
fiercely contemptuous review from Edgar Poe. Though 
disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of Chan- 
ning' s verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and 
the last line of his little piece, "A Poet's Hope," 

" If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," 
has taken a permanent place in the literature of tran- 
scendentalism. 

The private organ of the transcendentalists was The Dial, 
a quarterly magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and 
edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Among its con- 
tributors, besides those already mentioned, were Ripley, 
Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles A. Dana, 
John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and Wil- 
liam H. Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It 
contained, along with a good deal of rubbish, some of the 
best poetry and prose that have been published in America. 
The most lasting part of its contents was the contributions 
of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it was a 
unique way-mark in the history of our literature. 

From time to time Emerson collected and published his 
lectures under various titles. A first series of "Essays" 
came out in 1841, and a second in 1844; the "Conduct of 
Life," in 1860 ; "Society and Solitude," in 1870; "Letters 
and Social Aims" in 1876, and " The Fortune of the Re- 



110 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

public " in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of •' Poems," 
and in 1865 "Mayday and Other Poems." These writings, 
as a whole, were variations on a single theme, expansions 
and illustrations of the philosophy set forth in "Nature" 
and his early addresses. They were strikingly original, 
rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality 
and spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first " cut 
the cable that bound us to English thought and gave us a 
chance at the dangers and glories of blue water." Never- 
theless, as it used to be the fashion to find an English 
analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was 
called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was de- 
scribed as the Hemans of America, a well-worn critical 
tradition has coupled Emerson with Carlyle. That his 
mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early essays and from 
** Sartor Eesartus " is beyond a doubt. They were life-long 
friends and correspondents, and Emerson's " Representa- 
tive Men" is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's 
" Hero Worship." But in temper and style the two writ- 
ers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dissat- 
isfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him 
more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to 
the end. The last of his writings published during his life- 
time, "The Fortune of the Republic," contrasts strangely in 
its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlyle's later utter- 
ances. Even in presence of the doubt as to man's personal 
immortality he takes refuge in a high and stoical faith. " I 
think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary con- 
viction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal 
life shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it 
will not ; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see 
that it was better so." It is this conviction that gives to 
Emerson's writings their serenity and their tonic quality 
at the same time that it narrows the range of his dealings 



The Concord Writers. Ill 

with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine those 
facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks 
upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy 
to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away his 
eyes from the evil which he disposes of as merely nega- 
tive, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's interest in 
the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philoso- 
phy. Passion comes not nigh him, and " Faust " disturbs 
him with its disagreeableuess. Pessimism is to him "the 
only skepticism." 

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly 
human, or, in other words, that which will square best 
with all philosophies. But Emerson's genius was inter- 
pretative rather than constructive. The poet dwells in the 
cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who 
realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human 
life. But idealism makes experience shadowy and subor- 
dinates action to contemplation. To it the cities of men, 
with their " frivolous populations," 

*' are but sailing foam-bells 
Along thought's causing stream." 

Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day 
vanish "like the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we 
ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on"; but 
this is not the mood in which he dwells. Again : while it 
is for the philosoplier to reduce variety to unity, it is the 
poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In 
the great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and 
Goethe, how infinite the swarm of i)ersons, the multitude 
of forms ! But with Emerson the type is important, the 
common element. " In youth we are mad for persons. 
But the larger experience of man discovers the identical 
nature appearing through them all." "The same— the 
same !" he exclaims in his essay on Plato. "Friend and 



112 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



foe are of one stuff; the plowman, the plow, and the fur- j 
row are of one stuff." And this is the thought in 
" Brahma " : 

" They reckon ill who leave me out ; 

When me they fly I am the wings ; 
I am the doubter and the doubt, i 

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." ' 

It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this attitude 
toward "persons" descending to the composition of a 
novel or a play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of 
character analj^sis in his "English Traits" and "Repre- 
sentative Men " and in his memoirs of Thoreau and Mar- 
garet Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in 
his portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands 
midway between constructive artists, whose instinct it is 
to tell a story or sing a song, and philosophers, like Schell- 
ing, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. 
He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas 
Browne is the best English example. He set a high value 
upon Browne, to w^hose style his ow-n, though far more 
sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for ex- 
ample, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of 
God," sounds like Emerson, whose w^orkmanship, for the 
rest, in his prose essays w^as exceedingly fine and close. 
He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing 
thought of the highest spirituality. " Hitch your wagon 
to a star," is a good instance of his favorite manner. 

Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most 
of his pieces are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, 
or little oracular " voicings"— as they say at (^Joncord— in 
rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on " Worship," "Char- 
acter," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics," "Culture," etc. 
The content is the important thing, and the form is too 
frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the 



The Concord Writers. 113 

clear-obscure of Emerson's jjoetrj^, the deep wisdom of the 
thought finds its most natural expression in the imagina- 
tive simplicity of the language. But though this artless- 
ness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like 
Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, 
among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be 
desired in point of wording and of verse. His "Hymn 
Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument," in 
1836, is the perfect model of an occasional poem. Its lines 
were on everyone's lips at the time of the centennial cele- 
brations in 1876, and the " shot heard round the world " 
has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled 
it. Equally current is the stanza from " Voluntaries " : 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, ' Thou must,' 

The youth replies, ' I can.' " 

So, too, the famous lines from " The Problem " : 

" The hand that rounded Peter's dome, 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
Wrought in a sad sincerity. 
Himself from God he could not free ; 
He builded better than he knew ; 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

The most noteworthy of Emerson's ]pupils was Henry 
David Thoreau, "the poet naturalist." After his gradu- 
ation from Harvard College, in 1837, Thoreau engaged in 
school-teaching and in the manufacture of lead-pencils, but 
soon gave uj) all regular business and devoted himself to 
walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one 
time private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he 
supported himself for a season by doing odd jobs in land- 
surveying for the farmers about Concord. In 1845 he built, 
with his own hands, a small cabin on the banks of Walden 
Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two 



114 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a 
daj", and he gave an account of his experiment in his most 
characteristic book, "Walden," published in 1854. His 
"Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers " appeared 
in 1849. From time to time he went fiirther afield, and his 
journeys were reported in "Cape Cod," the "Maine 
Woods," "Excursions," and "A Yankee in Canada," all 
of which, as well as a volume of " Letters " and "Early 
Spring in Massachusetts," have been given to the public 
since his death, which happened in 1862. No one has lived 
so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as 
Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon 
on Emerson's text, " Lessen your denominator." He 
wished to reduce existence to the simplest terms — to 

" live all alone 
Close to the bone, 
And where life is sweet 
Constantly eat." 

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo- 
Saxon reversion to the type of the Red Indian. The most 
distinctive note in Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson 
spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism." "Man," 
said Thoreau, " is only the point on which I stand." He 
strove to realize the objective life of nature — nature in its 
aloofness from man ; to identify himself with the moose 
and the mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the 
ground, for the voice of the earth. " What are the trees 
saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of the 
lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, 
and 

*' saw beneath dim aisles in odorous beds, 
The slight linnsea hang its twin-born heads." 

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom 
the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in 



The Concord Writers. 115 

their indifTerence to the shipwrecked bodies that they 
rolled ashore. " After sitting in my chamber many days, 
reading the poets, I have been out earl^^ on a foggy morn- 
ing and heard the cry of an owl in the neighboring wood 
as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by sci- 
ence or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet 
realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. 
I had seen the red election birds brought from their re- 
cesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their 
plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, 
like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced 
farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still 
less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's 
string." 

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended 
transcendentalism. Mysticism has been defined as the 
soul's recognition of its identity with nature. This 
thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and he 
illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind 
and nature are one ; they are the positive and negative 
poles of the magnet. In man, the Absolute— that is, God 
— becomes conscious of himself ; makes of himself, as na- 
ture, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men," 
said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual 
eyes with which our infinite World-Spirit beholds him- 
self." This thought is also clearly present in Emerson's 
view of nature, and has caused him to be accused of 
pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine 
that the underlying principle of the universe is matter 
or force, none of the transcendentalists was a panthe- 
ist. In their view nature was divine. Their poetry is 
always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which 
abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's " Two 
Rivers" : 



116 Initial Studies in American Letters, 



" Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,* 

Repeats the miusic of the rain, 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee as thou through Concord plain. 
** Thou in thy narrow banks art pent : 

The stream I love unbounded goes ; 
Through flood and sea and firmament, 

Through light, through life, it forward flows. 
" I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream. 
Through years, through men, through nature fleet. 

Through passion, thought, through power and dream." 

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard 
world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, 
and he sees himself in it— sees God. "This earth," he 
cries, " which is spread out like a map around me, is but 
the lining of my inmost soul exposed." ''In me is the 
sucker that I see " ; and, of Walden Pond, 
" I am its stony shore, 
And the breeze that passes o'er." 
"Suddenly old Time winked at me— ah, you know me, 
you rogue— and news had come that it was well. That 
ancient universe is in such capital health, I think, un- 
doubtedly it will never die. ... I see, smell, taste, 
hear, feel that everlasting something to which we are allied, 
at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." 
It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. 
"The other world," he wrote, " is all my art : my pencils 
will draw no other : my jack-knife will cut nothing else." 
Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, to " exam- 
ine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a 
close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds 
and plants and the minuter aspects of nature. He has had 
many followers, who have produced much pleasant litera- 
ture^on outdoor life. But in none of them is there that 
* The Indian name of Concord River. 



The Concord Writers. 117 

unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and the 
mystic which gives liis page its wild, original flavor. He 
had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, 
but his imagination did not stop short with the fact. The 
sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him " as 
though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy 
wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His 
trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excite- 
ment of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown re- 
gions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of 
flood " when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, 
heaving up the surface into dark and somber billows," was 
like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cran- 
berry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as any- 
where on the northwest coast." He said that most of the 
phenomena described in Kane's voyages could be observed 
in Concord. 

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of 
the stars in a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had 
the pale cast of thought, and was almost too spiritual and 
remote to "hit the sense of mortal sight." But it was at 
least indigenous. If not an American literature — not na- 
tional and not inclusive of all sides of American life — it 
was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and 
true to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock 
had at last put forth a blossom which compared with the 
warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate 
wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cow- 
slips and daisies of old England. 

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest 
American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left 
Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he 
settled down in the "Old Manse" for three paradisiacal 
years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this 



118 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose 
banks it was passed, is given in the introductory chapter 
to his *' Mosses from an Old Manse," 1846, and in the more 
personal and confidential records of his ** American Note 
Books," posthumously published. Hawthorne was thirty- 
eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. 
His childhood and youth had been spent partly at his 
birthplace, the old and already somewhat decayed seaport 
town of Salem, and partly at his grandfather's farm on 
Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the primitive 
forest. Maine did not become a state, indeed, until 1820, 
the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, 
whence he was graduated in 1825, in the same class with 
Henry W. Longfellow and one year behind Franklin 
Pierce, afterward president of the United States. After 
leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the 
seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was 
early widowed, had withdrawn entirely from the world. 
For months at a time Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no 
other society than that of his mother and sisters, reading 
all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he 
destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he 
would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through 
the streets of the town or along the seaside. 

Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its associ- 
ations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the 
seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, 
the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Haw- 
thorne's father had been a ship captain, and many of his 
ancestors had followed the sea. One of his forefathers, 
moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 
1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The 
thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a 
pleasing horror, and he utilized it afterward in his " House 



The Concord Writers. 110 

of the Seven Gables." Many of the old Salem houses, too, 
had their family histories, with now and then the hint of 
some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted pos- 
terity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into 
poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Haw- 
thorne's romance. 

In the preface to " The Marble Faun " Hawthorne wrote : 
''No author without atrial can conceive of the difficulty 
of writing a romance about a country where there is no 
shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and 
gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosper- 
ity in broad and simple dayhght.'' And yet it may be 
doubted whether any environment could have been found 
more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native 
town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen the 
faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of 
waiting and brooding thought. 

From time to time he contributed a story or a sketch to 
some periodical, such as S. G. Goodrich's annual, the 
Token, or the Knickerhocker Magazine. Some of these at- 
tracted the attention of the judicious ; but they were 
anonymous and signed by various noms cle plume, and 
their author was at this time— to use his own words—" the 
obscurest man of letters in America." In 1828 he had is- 
sued anonymously^ and at his own expense a short romance, 
entitled " Fanshawe." It had little success, and copies of 
the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he pub- 
lished a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, 
" Twice-Told Tales." The book was generously praised in 
the North American Review by his former classmate, Long- 
fellow ; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical perception 
by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at 
the head of imaginative Uterature in America if he would 
discard allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genu- 



120 Initial Studies in ATuerican Letters. 

ine romance. Poe compared Hawthorne's work with that 
of the German romancer, Tieck, and it is interesting to find 
confirmation of tliis dictum in passages of tlie "American 
Note Books," in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over 
Tieck with a German dictionary. The " Twice-Told Tales " 
are the work of a recluse, w^ho makes guesses at life from a 
knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of intro- 
spection, but who has had little contact with men. Many 
of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and un- 
wholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never 
the physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psycho- 
logical situations like that of " Ethan Brand " in his search 
for the unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the in- 
herited instinct of puritanism ; he took the conscience for 
his theme, and in these early tales he was already absorbed 
in the problem of evil, the subtle ^vays in which sin w^orks 
out its retribution, and the species of fate or necessity that 
the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable se- 
quences of his crime. 

Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols and 
types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon 
allegory. "The Scarlet Letter" and his other romances 
are not, indeed, strictly allegories, since the characters are 
men and women and not mere personifications of abstract 
qualities. Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge. 
In "The Marble Faun," for example, Hilda, Kenyon, 
Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as 
personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, 
the imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as 
this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other 
creations something typical and representative. He uses 
his characters like algebraic symbols to work out certain 
problems with ; they are rather more and yet rather less 
than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in "Twice- 



The Concord Writers. 121 

Told Tales " and in the second collection, " Mosses from an 
Old Manse," 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later 
work. Thus "The Minister's Black Veil" is a sort of 
anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in " The Scarlet 
Letter." 

From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the position of sur- 
veyor of the custom-house of Salem. In the preface to 
' ' The Scarlet Letter " he sketched some of the government 
officials with whom this office had brought him into con- 
tact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of 
the victims and a great deal of amusement to the public. 
Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like Irving's, but 
less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book 
last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, 
just before its author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of in- 
land Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the 
Berkshire Hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over 
Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this pow- 
erful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implica- 
tion of its title. Hawthorne chose for his background the 
somber life of the early settlers of New England. He had 
always been drawn toward this part of American history, 
and in "Twice-Told Tales" had given some illustrations 
of it in "Endicott's Red Cross" and "Legends of the 
Province House." Against this dark foil moved in strong 
relief the figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in 
adultery ; her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale ; 
her husband, old Roger Chillingvvorth ; and her illegiti- 
mate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary 
passions of human nature, and in its deep and subtle in- 
sight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Haw- 
thorne's greatest book. 

He never crowded his canvas with figures. In " The 
Blithedale Romance" and "The Marble Faun" there is 



122 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

the same par^i carre, or group of four characters. In " The 
House of Seven Gables" there are five. The last men- 
tioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued 
intensity than " The Scarlet Letter," but equally original, 
and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. " The Blithe- 
dale Romance," published in the same year, though not 
strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conven- 
tional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature 
of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, 
and the terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were 
suggested to the author by an experience of his own on 
Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, 
may be read in Julian Hawthorne's " Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne and His Wife." 

In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the 
" Wayside " property, which he retained until his death. 
But in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now 
become president, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and 
he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit 
of his foreign residence was the romance of "The Marble 
Faun," 1860, the longest of his fictions and the richest in 
descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the develop- 
ment of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a 
haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil 
of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even 
a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Dona- 
tello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakespeare's Cal- 
iban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side the 
border-line of the human. "Our Old Home," a book of 
charming papers on England, was published in 18G3. Man- 
ifold experience of life and contact w\i\\ men, affording 
scope for his always keen observation, had added range, 
fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had 
manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable 



The Concord Writers. 123 

books for children, "The AVoiider Book" and "Tangle- 
wood Tales," in which the classical mythologies were re- 
told, should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's 
writings, as well as the "American," "English," and 
" Italian Note Books," the first of which contains the seed- 
thoughts of some of his finished works, together with hun- 
dreds of hints for plots, episodes, descriptions, etc., which 
he never found time to work out. Hawthorne's style, in 
his first sketches and stories a little stilted and bookish, 
gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well 
worth study as that of any prose classic in the English 
tongue. 

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much 
in a world of ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the 
tree on the bank or its image in the stream were the more 
real. But this had little in common with the philosophi- 
cal idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, 
and he held kindly intercourse — albeit a silent man and 
easily bored — with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and 
even with Margaret Fuller. But his sharp eyes saw what- 
ever was whimsical or weak in the aj^ostles of the new 
faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and 
among so many abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and 
even wrote a campaign life of his friend Pierce. 

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for Ameri- 
can literature than the city of New York. Certainly there 
are few places where associations, both patriotic and poetic, 
cluster so thickly. At one side of the grounds of the Old 
Manse— which has the river at its back— runs down a 
shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of 
the Minute Man and the successor of " the rude bridge that 
arched the fiood." Scarce two miles away, among the 
woods, is little Walden— " God's drop." The men who 
made Concord famous are asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet 



124 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

still their inemory prevails to draw seekers after truth to 
the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met 
annually, a few years since, to reason high of " God, Free- 
dom, and Immortality," next door to the "Wayside," and 
under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path as 
he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks. 

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature"; "The 
American Scholar"; "Literary Ethics"; "The Tran- 
scendentalist " ; "The Over-soul"; "Address before the 
Cambridge Divinity School " ; " English Traits " ; " Rep- 
resentative Men " ; " Poems." 

2. Henry David Thoreau : "Excursions"; " Wal- 
den " ; "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers " ; 
" Cape Cod " ; " The Maine Woods." 

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Mosses from an Old 
Manse"; "The Scarlet Letter"; "The House of the 
Seven Gables" ; " The Blithedale Romance " ; " The Mar- 
ble Faun" ; " Our Old Home." 

4. "Transcendentalism in New England." By O. B. 
Frothingham. New York : 1875. 



CHAPTER V. 

The Cambridge Scholars— 1837-1861. 

With few exceptions, the men who have made Ameri- 
can literature what it is have been college graduates. And 
yet our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, 
literary centers. Most of them have been small and poor, 
and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their 
alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, 
and even those of them who may feel drawn to a life of 
scholarship or letters find little to attract them at the home 
of their alma mater, and seek by preference the larger 
cities, where periodicals and publishing houses ofier some 
hope of support in a literary career. Even in the older and 
better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of 
working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and 
rather inclined to undervalue merely "literary " perform- 
ance. In many cases the fastidious and hypercritical turn 
of mind which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism 
which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, 
and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses 
free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence 
upon the originality and creative impulse of their inmates. 
Hence it happens that, while the contributions of Ameri- 
can college teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and 
philology, metaphysics, pohtical philosophy, and the se- 
verer branches of learning have been honorable and impor- 
tant, they have as a class made little mark upon the gen- 
eral literature of the country. The professors of literature 

125 



126 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

in our colleges are usually persons who have made no addi- 
tions to literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem or- 
dinarily to have been selected to teach students how to 
write, for the reason that they themselves have never writ- 
ten anything that any one has ever read. 

To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years 
ago offers some striking exceptions. It was not the large 
and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be, 
with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, 
and its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates ; but 
a small school of the classics and mathematics, with some- 
thing of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages 
added to its old-fashioned scholastic curriculum, and with 
a very homogeneous clientele, drawn mainly from the 
Unitarian families of eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless 
a finer intellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old 
Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than 
nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other 
American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, 
where the commercial life has never so entirely overlain 
the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia, has been 
a standing advantage to Harvard College. The recent up- 
heaval in religious thought had secured toleration and made 
possible that free and even audacious interchange of ideas 
without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From 
these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old 
Harvard scholarship had-an elegant and tasteful side to it, 
so that the dry erudition of the schools blossomed into a gen- 
erous culture ; and there were men in the professors' chairs 
who were no less efficient as teachers because they were 
also poets, orators, w4ts, and men of the world. In the 
seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated 
from Harvard College, Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phil- 
lips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale ; 



Hie Cambridge Scholars. 127 

some of whom took up their residence at Cambridge, others 
at Boston, and others at Concord, whicli was quite as much 
a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 1836, 
when Longfellow became professor of modern languages 
at Harvard, Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. 
The following year— in which Thoreau took his bachelor's 
degree — witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta 
Kappa lecture on " The American Scholar," in the college 
chapel, and Wendell Phillips's speech on " The Murder of 
Lovejoy," in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, whose description of 
the impression produced by the former of these famous 
addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was an 
undergraduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, 
and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern 
languages. Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of 
anatomy and physiology in the Medical School — a position 
which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott and 
Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. 
The former's first important publication, " Ferdinand and 
Isabella," appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in 
the college in 1822-23, and the initial volume of his " His- 
tory of the United States " was issued in 1835. Another of 
the Massachusetts school of historical writers, Francis 
Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844. Cam- 
bridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural out- 
skirt of Boston, such as Lowell described it in his article, 
" Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," originally contributed to 
Putnam's Monthly in 1853, and afterward reprinted in his 
"Fireside Travels," 1864. The situation of a university 
scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one. 
Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and 
social clubs, its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, 
dinner-parties, etc., he yet lived withdrawn in an academic 
retirement among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gardens ; 



128 Initial Studies in AmetHcan Letters. 

the dome of the Boston State-house looming distantly 
across the meadows where the Charles laid its "steel-blue 
sickle" upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide 
marsh. There was thus, at all times during the quarter of 
a century embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of 
brilliant men resident in or about Cambridge and Boston, 
meeting frequently and intimately, and exerting upon 
one another a most stimulating influence. Some of the 
closer circles — all concentric to the university — of which 
this group was loosely composed were laughed at by out- 
siders as "Mutual Admiration Societies." Such was, for 
instance, the " Five of Clubs," whose members were Long- 
fellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Har- 
vard and afterward president of the college, G. S. Hillard, 
a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat ama- 
teurish kind, and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, 
a lover of books and a writer of them. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most widely 
read and loved of American poets — or, indeed, of all con- 
temporary poets in England and America, though identified 
with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a native of Port- 
land, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the 
same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, 
he had studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and 
had held the professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. 
He had published several text-books, a number of articles 
on the Romance languages and literatures in the North 
American Hevieiu, a thin volume of metrical translations 
from the Spanish, a few original poems in various period- 
icals, and the pleasant sketches of European travel entitled 
" Outre-Mer." But Longfellow's fame began with the ap- 
pearance in 1839 of his " Voices of the Night." Excepting 
an earlier collection by Bryant this was the first volume of 
real poetry published in New England, and it had more 



The Cambridge Scholars. 129 

warmth and sweetness, a greater richness and variety, than 
Bryant's work ever possessed. Longfellow's genius was al- 
most feminine in its flexibility and its sympathetic quality. 
It readil}^ took the color of its surroundings and opened 
itself eagerly to impressions of the beautiful from every 
quarter, but especially from books. This first volume con- 
tained a few things written during his student days at 
Bowdoin, one of which, a blank-verse piece on "Autumn," 
clearly shows the influence of Bryant's " Thanatopsis." 
Most of these juvenilia had nature for their theme, but 
thej^ were not so sternly true to the New England land- 
scape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and the ivy ap- 
pear among their scenic properties, and in the best of them, 
"Woods in Winter," it is the English " hawthorn," and 
not any American tree, through which the gale is made to 
blow, just as later Longfellow uses "rooks" instead of 
crows. The young poet's fancy was instinctively putting 
out feelers toward the storied lands of the Old World, and 
in his "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem" he 
transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters to a 
cathedral with "glimmering tapers," swinging censers, 
chancel, altar, cowls, and "dim mysterious aisle." After 
his visit to Europe Longfellow returned deeply imbued 
with the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine 
our national taste by opening to American readers, in their 
own vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of 
foreign tongues. The fact that this mission was interpre- 
tative, rather than creative, hardly detracts from Longfel- 
low's true originality. It merely indicates that his inspira- 
tion came to him in the first instance from other sources 
than the common life about him. He naturally began as a 
translator, and this first volume contained, among other 
things, exquisite renderings from the German of Uhland, 
Salis, and Miiller, from the Danish, French, Spanish, and 



130 Initial Studies in Ainerican Letters. 

Anglo-Saxon, and a few passages from Dante. Longfellow 
remained all his life a translator, and in subtler ways than 
by direct translation he infused the fine essence of Euro- 
pean poetry into his own. He loved 

" Tales that have the rime of age 
And chronicles of eld." 

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it 

is his habit to borrow medieval and Catholic imagery from 

his favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American 

subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars, that " tell 

their beads in droj^s of rain " ; the midnight winds blowing 

through woods and mountain passes are chanting solemn 

masses for the repose of the dying year, and the strain ends 

with the prayer — 

" Kyrie, eleyson, 
Christe, eleyson." 

In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black 
shadows lie upon the grass like engravings in a book. 
Autumn has written his rubric on the illuminated leaves, 
the wind turns them over and chants like a friar." This 
in Cambridge, of a moonshiny night, on the first day of the 
American October! But several of the pieces in "Voices 
of the Night " sprang more immediately from the poet's 
own inner experience. The "Hymn to the Night," the 
" Psalm of Life," " The Reaper and the Flowers," "Foot- 
steps of Angels," "The Light of Stars," and " The Be- 
leaguered City" spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, pa- 
tience, and faith. In these lovely songs, and in many 
others of the same kind which he afterward wrote, Long- 
fellow touched the hearts of all his countrymen. America 
is a country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet of sen- 
timent and of the domestic affections, became and remains 
far more general in his appeal than such a "cosmic" 
singer as Whitman, who is still practically unknown to the 



The Cambridge Scholars. 131 



"fierce democracy" to which he has addressed himself. 
It would be liard to overestimate the influence for good 
exerted by the tender feeling and the pure and sweet moral- 
ity which the hundreds of thousands of copies of Long- 
fellow's writings, that have been circulated among readers 
of all classes in America and England, have brought with 
them. 

Three later collections, "Ballads and Other Poems," 
1842 ; " The Belfry of Bruges," 1846 ; and "The Seaside and 
the Fireside," 1850, comprise most of what is noteworthy 
in Longfellow's minor poetry. The first of these embraced, 
together with some renderings from the German and the 
Scandinavian languages, specimens of stronger original 
work than the author had yet put forth ; namely, the two 
powerful ballads of "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The 
Wreck of the Hesperus." The former of these, written in 
the swift leaping meter of Drayton's " Ode to the Cambro 
Britons on their Harp," was suggested by the digging up of 
a mail-clad skeleton at Fall River— a circumstance which 
the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower 
at Newport, thus giving to the whole the spirit of a Norse 
viking song of war and of the sea. "The Wreck of the 
Hesperus" was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on 
the coast near Gloucester, and by the name of a reef— " Nor- 
man's Woe"— where many of them took place. It was 
written one night between twelve and three, and cost the 
poet, he said, " hardly an effort." Indeed, it is the spon- 
taneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of Longfellow's 
lines, which are their best technical quality. There is noth- 
ing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If there is little 
passion or intellectual depth, there is always genuine poetic 
feeling, often a very high order of imagination, and almost 
invariably the choice of the right word. In this volume 
were also included "The Village Blacksmith" and 



132 Initial Studies in Americah Letters. 

" Excelsior." The latter and the "Psalm of Life" have 
had a " damnable iteration " which causes them to figure as 
Longfellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, 
however, among his best. They are vigorously expressed 
commonplaces of that hortatory kind w^hich passes for 
poetry, but is, in reality, a vague species of preaching. 

Li "The Belfry of Bruges" and "The Seaside and the 
Fireside" the translations were still kept up, and among 
the original pieces were "The Occultation of Orion," the 
most imaginative of all Longfellow's poems, "Seaweed," 
which has very noble stanzas, the favorite "Old Clock on 
the Stairs," " The Building of the Ship," with its magnifi- 
cent closing apostrophe to the Union, and "The Fire of 
Driftwood," the subtlest in feeling of anything that the 
poet ever wrote. With these were verses of a naore familiar 
quality, such as "The Bridge," "Resignation," and "The 
Day is Done," and many others, all reflecting moods of 
gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing froni analogies 
in nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat obvious, 
w^ere expressed with perfect art. Like Keats, he appre- 
hended everything on its beautiful side. Longfellow was 
all poet. Like Ophelia in " Hanalet," 

" Thought and affection, passion, hell itself, 
[He] turns to favor and to prettiness." 

He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the 
age. The transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his 
head and left him undisturbed. For politics he had that 
gentlemanly distaste which the cultivated class in America 
had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a small 
volume of " Poems on Slavery," which drew commenda- 
tion from his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the 
fervor of Whittier's or Lowell's utterances on the same sub- 
ject. 

It is interesting to compare his journals with Haw- 



The Cambridge Scholars. 133 

thorne's " American Note Books," and to observe in what 
very different ways tlie two writers made prey of their 
daily experiences for literary material. A favorite haunt 
of Longfellow's was the bridge between Boston and Cam- 
bridgeport, the same which he put into verse in his poem, 
" The Bridge." " I always stop on the bridge," he writes 
in his journal ; " tide waters are beautiful. From the ocean 
up into the land they go, like messengers, to ask why the 
tribute has not been paid. The brooks and rivers answer 
that there has been little harvest of snow and rain this 
year. Floating seaweed and kelp are carried up into the 
meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in bandanna 
handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again : 
" We leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the 
silvery reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. 
Among other thoughts we had this cheering one, that the 
whole sea was flashing with this heavenly light, though we 
saw it only in a single track ; the dark waves are the dark 
providences of God ; luminous, though not to us ; and even 
to ourselves in another position." "Walk on the bridge, 
both ends of which are lost in the fog, like human life mid- 
way between two eternities ; beginning and ending in 
mist." In Hawthorne an allegoric meaning is usually 
something deeper and subtler than this, and seldom so 
openly expressed. Many of Longfellow's poems — "The 
Beleaguered City" for example — may be definitely divided 
into two parts ; in the first, a story is told or a natural phe- 
nomenon described ; in the second, the spiritual application 
of the parable is formally set forth. This method became 
with him almost a trick of style, and his readers learn to 
look for the hcBO fabula docet at the end as a matter of 
course. As for the prevailing optimism in Longfellow's 
view of life — of which the above passage is an instance — 
it seems to be in him an affair of temperament, and not, as 



134 Initial Studies in Ainerican Letters. 

in Emerson, the result of philosophic insight. Perhaps, 
however, in the last analysis, optimism and pessimism are 
subjective — the expression of temperament or individual 
experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether 
seen through Schopenhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. 
If there is any particular in which Longfellow's inspiration 
came to him at first hand and not through books, it is in 
respect to the aspects of the sea. On this theme no Ameri- 
can poet has written more beautifully and with a keener 
sympathy than the author of " The Wreck of the Hesperus " 
and of "Seaweed." 

In 1847 was published the long poem of "Evangeline." 
The story of the Acadian peasant girl who was separated 
from her lover in the dispersion of her people by the Eng- 
lish troops, and after weary wanderings and a life-long 
search, found him at last, an old man, dying in a Philadel- 
phia hospital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. 
Conolly, who had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as 
a subject for a story. Longfellow^ characteristically enough, 
"got up" the local color for his poem from Haliburton's 
account of the dispersion of the Grand Pr6 Acadians, from 
Darby's "Geographical Description of Louisiana" and 
Watson's "Annals of Philadelphia." He never needed to 
go much outside his library for literary imjDulse and mate- 
rial. Whatever may be held as to Longfellow's inventive 
powers as a creator of characters or an interpreter of Amer- 
ican life, his originality as an artist is manifested by his 
successful domestication in "Evangeline" of the dactylic 
hexameter, which no English poet had yet used with ef- 
fect. The English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who lived 
for a time in Cambridge, followed Longfellow's example in 
the use of hexameter in his " Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," 
so that we have now arrived at the time — a proud moment 
for American letters — when the works of our writers began 



The Cambridge Scholars. 135 

to react upon the literature of Europe. But the beauty of 
the descriptions in "Evangeline" and the pathos — somewhat 
too drawn out — of the story made it dear to a multitude of 
readers who cared nothing about the technical disputes of 
Poe and other critics as to whether or not Longfellow's 
lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to represent truthfully 
the quantitative hexameters of Homer and Vergil. 

In 1855 appeared " Hiawatha," Longfellow's most aborig- 
inal and "American " book. The tripping trochaic meas- 
ure he borrowed from the Finnish epic " Kalevala." The 
vague, childlike mythology of the Indian tribes, with its 
anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, 
animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from 
Schoolcraft's "Algic Researches," 1839. He fixed forever, 
in a skilfully chosen poetic form, the more inward and im- 
aginative part of Indian character, as Cooper had given 
permanence to its external and active side. Of Longfel- 
low's dramatic experiments, "The Golden Legend," 1851, 
alone deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm; 
a tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle 
Ages, precious with martyrs' blood and bathed in the rich 
twilight of the cloister. It contains some of his best work, 
but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic, although 
Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered 
into the temper of the monk. 

Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. 
He gave freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. 
Those who have looked into his poetry for something else 
than poetry, or for poetry of some other kind, have not 
been slow to assert that he was a lady's poet — one who sat- 
isfied callow youths and schoolgirls by uttering common- 
places in graceful and musical shape, but who offered no 
strong meat for men. Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, 
and the poet himself— or, rather, a portrait of the poet which 



136 Initial Studies in American Letter's. 

frontispieced an illustrated edition of his works — a '* dandy- 
Pindar." This is not true of his poetry, or of the best of 
it. But he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in 
his prose one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. 
"Hyperion," for example, published in 1839, a loitering 
fiction interspersed with descriptions of European travel, 
is, upon the whole, a weak book, overflowery in diction 
and sentimental in tone. 

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator 
was his great version of Dante's " Divina Commedia," pub- 
lished between 1867 and 1870. It is a severely literal, al- 
most a line for line, rendering. The meter is preserved, 
but the rhyme sacrificed. If not the best English poem 
constructed from Dante, it is at all events the most faith- 
ful and scholarly paraphrase. The sonnets which accom- 
panied it are among Longfellow's best work. He seems 
to have been raised by daily communion w-ith the great 
Tuscan into a habit of deeper and more subtle thought 
than is elsewhere common in his poetry. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was a native of Cam- 
bridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class of '29 ; a 
class whose anniversary reunions he has celebrated in 
something like forty distinct poems and songs. For sheer 
cleverness and versatility Dr. Holmes was, perhaps, unri- 
valed among American men of letters. He has been poet, 
wit, humorist, novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and 
writer on medical topics. In all of these departments he 
has produced work which ranks high, if not with the 
highest. His father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of 
Yale and an orthodox minister of liberal temper, but the 
son early threw in his lot with the Unitarians ; and, as 
was natural to a man of satiric turn and with a very hu- 
man enjoyment of a fight, w\hose youth was cast in an age 
of theological controversy, he had his fling at Calvinism, 



The Cambridge Scholars . 137 

and prolonged the slogans of old battles into a later gen- 
eration ; sometimes, perhaps, insisting upon them rather 
wearisomely and beyond the limits of good taste. He had, 
even as an undergraduate, a reputation for cleverness at 
writing comic verses, and many of his good things in this 
kind, such as "The Dorchester Giant" and "The Height 
of the Ridiculous," were contributed to the Collegian^ a 
students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider 
public by his spirited ballad of " Old Ironsides " — 

" Ay ! Tear her tattered ensign down ! " — 
composed about 1839, when it was proposed by the govern- 
ment to take to pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the fa- 
mous old man-of-war, Constitution. Holmes's indignant 
protest — which has been a favorite subject for schoolboy 
declamation — had the effect of postponing the vessel's fate 
for a great many years. From 1830-35 the young poet was 
pursuing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contrib- 
uting now and then some verses to the magazines. Of his 
life as a medical student in Paris there are many pleasant 
reminiscences in his "Autocrat" and other writings, as 
where he tells, for instance, of a dinner-party of Americans 
in the French capital, where one of the company brought 
tears of homesickness into the eyes of his sodales by saying 
that the tinkle of the ice in the champagne glasses re- 
minded him of the cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of 
New England. In 1836 he printed his first collection of 
poems. The volume contained, among a number of pieces 
broadly comic, like "The September Gale," "The Music 
Grinders," and "The Ballad of the Oysterman " — which 
at once became widely popular, — a few poems of a finer and 
quieter temper, in which there was a quaint blending of 
the humorous and the pathetic. Such were "My Aunt" 
and "The Last Leaf" — which Abraham Lincoln found 
"inexpressibly touching," and which it is difficult to read 



138 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

without the double tribute of a smile and a tear. The vol- 
ume contained also " Poetry : A Metrical Essay," read be- 
fore the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 
which was the first of that long line of capital occasional 
poems which Holmes has been spinning for half a cen- 
tury with no sign of fatigue and with scarcely any falling 
off in freshness ; poems read or spoken or sung at all man- 
ner of gatherings, public and private, at Harvard com- 
mencements, class days, and other academic anniversaries ; 
at inaugurations, centennials, dedications of cemeteries, 
meetings of medical associations, mercantile libraries, 
Burns clubs, and New England societies ; at rural festivals 
and city fairs ; openings of theaters, layings of corner- 
stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, funerals, commem- 
oration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to Dickens, 
Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, Farragut, 
the Grand-duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and what 
not. Probably no poet of any age or clime has written so 
much and so well to order. He has been particularly 
happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic 
feasts, or postprandial rhymes for the petit comity — the 
snug little dinners of the chosen few ; his 

" The quaint trick to cram the pithy line 
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine." 

And though he could write on occasion a " Song for a 
Temperance Dinner," he has preferred to chant the praise 
of the punch bowl and to 

" feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, 
The warm, champagny, old-particular-brandy-punchy feeling." 

It would be impossible to enumerate the many good 
things of this sort which Holmes has written, full of wit and 
wisdom, and of humor, lightly dashed with sentiment and 
sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, and unexpected 
turns of rhyme and phrase. Among the best of them are 



The Cambridge Scholars. 139 

"Nux Postcoenatica," "A Modest Request," "Ode for a 
Social Meeting," "The Boys," and "Rip Van Winkle, 
M.D." Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer poems, is 
the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to have 
consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He wrote 
as easily in this meter as if it were prose, and with much 
of Pope's epigrammatic neatness. He also managed with 
facility the anapsestics of Moore and the ballad stanza which 
Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries. It cannot 
be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the 
corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets 
should much outlive the occasion ; or that the habit of 
producing such verses on demand should foster in the pro- 
ducer that "high seriousness" which Matthew Arnold 
asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's poetrj^ 
is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society verse, but 
even in its serious moments too smart and too pretty to be 
taken very gravely ; with a certain glitter, knowingness, and 
flippancy about it, and an absence of that self-forgetfulness 
and intense absorption in its theme which characterize the 
work of the higher imagination. This is rather the prod- 
uct of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of 
quickness in the perception of analogies, was the staple of 
his mind. His resources in the way of figure, illustration, 
allusion, and anecdote were wonderful. Age could not 
wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, and there 
was as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the 
rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though 
the humorist in him rather outweighed the poet, he wrote 
a few things, like " The Chambered Nautilus " and "Home- 
sick in Heaven," which are as purely and deeply poetic as 
"The One-Hoss Shay" and "The Prologue" are funny. 
Dr. Holmes was not of the stufi" of which idealists and en- 
thusiasts are made. As a physician and a student of sci- 



140 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

ence, the facts of the material universe counted for much 
with him. His clear, positive, alert intellect was always 
impatient of mysticism. He had the sharp eye of the 
satirist and the man of the world for oddities of dress, dia- 
lect, and manners. Naturally the transcendental move- 
ment struck him on its ludicrous side, and in his " After- 
Dinner Poem," read at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at 
Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at the "Orphic 
odes" and *' runes" of the bedlamite seer and bard of 
mystery. 

" Who rides a beetle which he calls a ' sphinx.' 
And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme 
Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time ! 
Here babbling * Insight ' shouts in Nature's ears 
His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres ; 
There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, 
With * Whence am I? ' and ' Wherefore did I come? ' " 

Curiously enough, the author of these lines lived to write 
an appreciative life of the poet who wrote *' The Sphinx." 
There was a good deal of toryism or social conservatism in 
Holmes. He acknowledged a preference for the man with 
a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits, had been 
brought up in familiarity with books, and could pronounce 
" view " correctly. Readers unhappily not of the " Brah- 
min caste of New England" have sometimes resented as 
snobbishness Holmes's harping on "family," and his per- 
petual application of certain favorite shibboleths to other 
people's ways of speech. "The woman who calc'lates is 
lost." 

" Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope 
The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . 
Do put your accents in the proper spot : 
Don't, let me beg you, don't say ' How ? ' for ' What ? ' 
The things named ' pants ' in certain documents, 
A word not made for gentlemen, but ' gents.' " 

With the rest of "society," he was disposed to ridicule 



The Cambridge Scholars, 141 

the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and 
the long-haired. But when the Civil War broke out, he 
lent his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the 
cause of the Union. Tlie individuaUty of Holmes's writ- 
ings comes in part from their local and provincial bias. 
He has been the laureate of Harvard College and the bard 
of Boston City, an urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness 
for old Boston ways and things — the Common and the Frog 
Pond, Faneuil Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, 
Bunker Hill, Long AVharf, the Tea Party, and the town- 
crier. It was Holmes who invented the playful saying 
that " Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system.'* 
In 1857 was started the Atlantic Monthly^ a magazine 
which has x:)ublished a good share of the best work done by 
American writers within the past generation. Its immedi- 
ate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of 
papers, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," 1858, fol- 
lowed at once by "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," 
1859, and later by " The Poet at the Breakfast Table," 1873. 
*' The Autocrat " is its author's masteri^iece, and holds the 
fine quintessence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, 
genial observation, and ripe experience of men and cities. 
The form is as unique and original as the contents, being 
something between an essay and a drama ; a succession of 
monologues or table talks at a typical American boarding- 
house, with a thread of story running through the whole. 
The variety of mood and thought is so great that these 
conversations never tire, and the prose is interspersed with 
some of the author's choicest verse. " The Professor at the 
Breakfast Table " followed too closely on the heels of " The 
Autocrat," and had less freshness. The third number of 
the series was better, and was pleasantly reminiscent and 
slightly garrulous, Dr. Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four 
years old, and entitled to the gossiping privilege of age. 



142 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

The personnel of the " Breakfast Table " series, such as the 
landlady and the landlady's daughter and her sou, Benja- 
min Franklin, the schoolmistress, the young man named 
John, the Divinity Student, the Kohinoor, the Sculpin, the 
Scarabseus, and the Old Gentleman who sits opposite, are 
not fully drawn characters, but outlined figures, lightly 
sketched — as is the Autocrat's wont — by means of some 
trick of speech, or dress, or feature ; but they are quite life- 
like enough for their purpose, which is mainly to furnish 
listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of the chief 
talker. 

In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with 
two "medicated novels," "Elsie Venner " and "The 
Guardian AngeL" The first of these was a singular tale, 
whose heroine united with her very fascinating human at- 
tributes something of the nature of a serpent ; her mother 
having been bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before 
the birth of the girl, and kept alive meanwhile by the use 
of powerful antidotes. The heroine of "The Guardian 
Angel " inherited lawless instincts from a vein of Indian 
blood in her ancestry. These two books were studies of 
certain medico-psychological problems. They preached 
Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modi- 
fied nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted 
tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In 
"Elsie Venner," in particular, the weirdly imaginative 
and speculative character of the leading motive suggests 
Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and 
the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt con- 
trast with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want of 
keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, in particu- 
lar, and the satirical pictures of New England country life 
are open to the charge of caricature. In "The Guardian 
Angel" the figure of Byles Gridlej^ the old scholar, is 



The Cambridge Scholars. 143 

drawn with thorough sympathy, and though some of his 
acts are improbable, he is, on tlie whole, Holmes's most 
vital conception in the region of dramatic creation. 

James Russell Lowell (1819-91), the foremost of American 
critics and one of the foremost of American poets, was, 
like Holmes, a native of Cambridge, and, like Emerson 
and Holmes, a clergyman's son. In 1855 he succeeded 
Longfellow as professor of modern languages in Harvard 
College. Of late years he held important diplomatic posts, 
like Everett, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, and other Ameri- 
cans distinguished in letters, having been United States 
minister to Spain, and, under two administrations, to the 
court of St. James. Lowell was not so spontaneously and 
exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his popularity with 
the average reader has never been so great. His appeal has 
been to the few rather than to the many, to an audience of 
scholars and of the judicious rather than to the " ground- 
lings " of the general public. Nevertheless his verse, 
though without the evenness, instinctive grace, and un- 
erring good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a 
stronger intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly 
the superior. His first volume, "A Year's Life," 1841, gave 
some promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, The Pioneer^ 
which only reached its third number, though it counted 
among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and 
Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning). A second vol- 
ume of poems, printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, 
in such pieces as "The Shepherd of King Admetus," 
"Ehoecus," a classical myth, told in excellent blank 
verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor's pol- 
ished intaglios ; and " The Legend of Brittany," a narra- 
tive poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in the 
management of the story. As yet, it was evident, the 
young poet had not found his theme. This came with the 



144 Initial Studies in Ametncan Lette7's. 

outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in 
New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as 
a slave-holders' war, waged without provocation against a 
sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the 
area of slavery. 

In 1846, accordingly, "The Biglow Papers "began to 
appear in the Boston Courier^ and were collected and pub- 
lished in book form in 1848. These were a series of rhymed 
satires upon the government and the war party, written in 
the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the work of Hosea 
Biglow, a homespun genius in a down-east country town, 
whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied 
by the comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor 
of the First Church in Jaalam, and (prospective) member 
of many learned societies. The first jDaper was a derisive 
address to a recruiting sergeant, with a denunciation of the 
** nigger-drivin' states" and the " northern dough-faces " ; 
a plain hint that the North would do better to secede than 
to continue doing dirty w^ork for the South ; and an ex- 
pression of those universal peace doctrines which were 
then in the air, and to which Longfellow gave serious ut- 
terance in his " Occultation of Orion." 

" Ez for war, I call it murder — 

There you hev it plain an' flat : 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment for that ; 
God hez said so plump an' fairly, 

It's as long as it is broad, 
An' you've gut to git up airly 

Ef you want to take in God." 

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter 
received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, " a j'ung feller of 
our town that was cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin inter 
Miss Chiff arter a drum and fife," and who finds when he 
gets to Mexico that 



The Cambridge Scholars. 145 

"This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'." 

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, "What 
Mr. Robinson Thinks," an election ballad which caused 
universal laughter, and was on everybody's tongue. 

"The Biglow PaiDers " remain Lowell's most original 
contribution to American literature. They are, all in all, 
the best political satires in the language, and unequaled as 
portraitures of the Yankee character, with its cuteness, 
its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the racy 
humor of the dialect — which became in Lowell's hands a 
medium of literary expression almost as effective as Burns's 
Ayrshire Scotch — burned that moral enthusiasm and that 
hatred of wrong and deification of duty — " Stern daughter 
of the voice of God " — which, in the tough New England 
stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood of south- 
ern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, 
such as "The Present Crisis," "Ode to Freedom," and 
" The Capture of Fugitive Slaves," have the old Puritan 
fervor, and such lines as 

" They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right with two or three," 

and the passage beginning 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, "Wrong forever on the throne," 

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and 
disunion. Some of these were published in his volume of 
1848 and the collected edition of his poems, in two vol- 
umes, issued in 18-50. These also included his most ambi- 
tious narrative poem, "The Vision of Sir Launfal," an 
allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of 
the Holy Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric 
and didactic. The merit of " Sir Launfal" is not in the 
telling of the story, but in the beautiful descriptive epi- 
sodes, one of which, commencing. 



146 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
Then if ever come perfect days,^' 

is as current as anything ttiat lie has written. It is signifi- 
cant of tlie lacli of a natural impulse toward narrative in- 
vention in Lowell that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he 
never tried his hand at a novel. One of the most impor- 
tant parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly possessed, 
namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate 
it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson 
Wilbur, who edited "The Biglow Papers" with a delight- 
fully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes, in the 
prose essay " On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," 
and in the uncompleted poem, "Fitz Adam's Story." See 
also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on ** New 
England Two Centuries Ago." 

"The Biglow Papers" when brought out in a volume 
were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including 
a capital parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the "Jaalam 
Independent Blunderbuss" of the first sketch— afterward 
amplified and enriched— of that perfect Yankee idyl " The 
Courtin' ". Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of 
"Biglow Papers" appeared, called out by the events of 
the Civil War. Some of these, as, for instance, "Jonathan 
to John," a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly 
attitude toward the North, were not inferior to anything in 
the earlier series ; and others were even superior as poems, 
equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to anything that 
Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse. In 
such passages, the dialect wears rather thin, and there is a 
certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the 
vivid beauty and power and the figurative cast of the 
phrase in stanzas like the following : 

" Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth 
On war's red techstone rang true metal, 



The Carabridge Scholars. 147 

Who ventered life an' love an' youth 
For the gret prize o' death in battle? 

To him who, deadly hurt, agen 
Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 

Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 
That rived the rebel line asunder? " 

Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little 
sense of humor, wished that the author of " The Biglow 
Papers " "could have used good English." In the lines just 
quoted, indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect. 
In 1848 Lowell wrote *'A Fable for Critics," something after 
the style of Sir John Suckling's "Session of the Poets"; a 
piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the Ameri- 
can Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, 
and sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an indus- 
trious workman, like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but 
preferring to w^ait for the niood to seize him, he allowed 
eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to 1868, before publishing 
another volume of verse. In the latter year appeared " Un- 
der the Willows," which contains some of his ripest and 
most perfect work, notably "A Winter Evening Hymn to 
My Fire," with its noble and touching close — suggested by, 
perhaps, at any rate recalling, the dedication of Goethe's 
"Faust," 

'* Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten," 
the subtle " Footpath " and " In the Twilight," the lovely 
little poems "Auf Wiedersehen" and "After the Funeral," 
and a number of spirited political pieces, such as "Villa 
Franca" and " The Washers of the Shroud." This volume 
contained also his "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commem- 
oration" in 1865. This, although uneven, is one of the 
finest occasional poems in the language, and the most 
important contribution which our Civil War has made 
to song. It was charged with the grave emotion of one 
who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation of 



148 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

his alma m^ater in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a 
more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, 
fallen in the front of battle. Particularly noteworthy in 
this memorial ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the 
third strophe, beginning, " Many loved Truth," the ex- 
ordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and 
the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the 
youthful heroes who 

" come transfigured back, 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
Beautiful evermore and with the rays 
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." 

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic Monthly ^ and 
from 18G3 to 1872 the North American Review. His prose, 
beginning with an early volume of " Conversations on Some 
of the Old Poets," 1844, consisted mainly of critical essays 
on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, 
Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, together 
with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like "Witch- 
craft," " New England Two Centuries Ago," *' My Garden 
Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," * 'Abraham 
Lincoln." Two volumes of these were published in 1870 
and 1876, under the title "Among My Books," and another, 
" My Study Windows," in 1871. 

As a literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first. 
His scholarship was thorough, his judgment keen, and he 
poured out upon his page an unwithholding wealth of 
knowledge, humor, wit, and imagination from the fullness 
of an overflowing mind. His prose has not the chastened 
correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It is 
rich, exuberant, and sometimes overfanciful, running away 
into excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance 
pun, so as sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of 
pedantry and bad taste. Lowell's resources in the way of 



The Cambridge Scholars. 149 

illustration and comparison were endless, and the readiness 
of his wit and his delight in using it put many temptations 
in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense at his 
saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much 
poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his 
eye" ; or of his speaking of " a gentleman for whom the 
bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope 
and substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular," which 
is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of telling 
us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The 
critics also find fault with his coining such words as *' un- 
disprivacied," and with his writing such lines as the 
famous one— from "The Cathedral," 1870— 

" Spume-sliding down the bafiled decuman." 

It must be acknowledged that his earlier style lacked the 
crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason 
of its allusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure 
in it. They like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven 
thick, and where a thing is said in such a way as to recall 
many other things. It should also be added that these 
faults of taste— if faults they are— are almost entirely absent 
from his latest work. The prose of "Democracy and 
Other Addresses," 1887 (delivered for the most part in 
England, on various memorial occasions from 1881 to 1885), 
is admirably pure, dignified, and solid. The like is true 
of the posthumous volume of "Latest Literary Essays 
and Addresses," published in 1892. 

Mention should be made, in connection with this Cam- 
bridge circle, of one writer who touched its circumference 
briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, a graduate of Yale, who 
entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, and in 1840 
became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. 
Judd published several books, but the only one of them at 



150 Initial Studies in Amei'ican Letters. 

all rememberable was "Margaret," 1845, a novel of which 
Lowell said, in **A Fable for Critics," that it was *' the first 
Yanliee book with the soul of down-east in it." It was 
very imperfect in point of art, and its second part— a rhap- 
sodical description of a sort of Unitarian Utopia — is quite 
unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief charac- 
ters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England 
township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as 
well as in the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was 
genius of a high order. 

As the country has grown older and more populous, and 
works in all departments of thought have multiplied, it 
becomes necessary to draw more strictly the line between 
the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. 
Political history, in and of itself, scarcely falls within the 
limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether dis- 
missed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands imagi- 
nation, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion 
in the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which 
are literary qualities. It is significant that many of our 
best historians have begun authorship in the domain of 
imaginative literature : Bancroft with an early volume of 
poems; Motley with his historical romances, ** Merry 
Mount" and "Morton's Hope"; and Parkman with a 
novel, " Vassall Morton." The oldest of that modern group 
of writers that have given America an honorable position 
in the historical literature of the world was William Hick- 
ling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme the 
history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a sub- 
ject full of romantic incident and susceptible of that glow- 
ing and perhaps slightly overgorgeous coloring which he 
laid on with a liberal hand. His completed histories, in 
their order, are " The Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella," 
1837; "The Conquest of Mexico," 1843— a topic which 



The Cambridge Scholars. 151 



Irving had relinquished to him ; and " The Conquest of 
Peru," 1847. Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure 
and fortune, but he had difficulties of another kind to over- 
come. He was nearly blind, and had to teach himself 
Spanish and look up authorities through the help of others, 
and to write with a noctograph or by amanuenses. 

George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his 
great "History of the United States" in 1834, and exactly 
half a century later the final volume of the work, bringing 
the subject down to 1789. Bancroft had studied at Got- 
tingen, and imbibed from the German historian Heeren the 
scientific method of historical study. He had access to 
original sources, in the nature of collections and state 
papers in the governmental archives of Europe, of which 
no American had hitherto been able to avail himself. His 
history in thoroughness of treatment leaves nothing to be 
desired, and has become the standard authority on the sub- 
ject. As a literary performance merely, it is somewhat 
wanting in flavor, Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff 
when compared with Motley's or Parkman's. The histor- 
ian's services to his country have been publicly recognized 
by his successive appointments as secretary of the navy, 
minister to England, and minister to Germany. 

The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was 
John Lothrop Motley (1814-77), who, like Bancroft, was a 
student at Gottingen and United States minister to England. 
His "Rise of the Dutch RepubUc," 1856, and "History of 
the United Netherlands," published in installments from 
1861 to 1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thorough- 
ness and philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque 
brilliancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in 
its masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding 
the reader, in this particular, of Macaulay's figure painting. 
The episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of the 



152 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

cathedral, and of the defeat and wreck of the Spanish Ar- 
mada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous description of 
Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico ; while the elder his- 
torian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal 
sketches of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of 
Navarre, and William the Silent. The " Life of John of 
Barneveld," 1874, completed this series of studies upon the 
history of the Netherlands, a theme to which Motley was 
attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for lib- 
erty offered, in some resjDects, a parallel to the growth of 
political independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and 
especially in his own America. 

The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom 
we shall mention is Francis Parkman (1823-93), whose sub- 
ject has the advantage of being thoroughly American. His 
^'Oregon Trail," 1847, a series of sketches of jDrairie and 
Rocky Mountain life, originally contributed to the Knicker- 
bocker Magazine, display's his early interest in the American 
Indians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, "The 
Conspiracy of Pontiac." This has been followed by the 
series entitled "France and England in North America," 
the six successive parts of which are as follows : " The Pio- 
neers of France in the New World " ; " The Jesuits in North 
America " ; "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West " ; 
** The Old Regime in Canada "; "Count Frontenacand New 
France" ; and "Montcalm and Wolfe." These narratives 
have a wonderful vividness and a romantic interest not in- 
ferior to Cooper's novels. Parkman made himself personally 
familiar with the scenes which he described, and some of 
the best descriptions of American woods and waters are to 
be found in his histories. If any fault is to be found with 
his books, indeed, it is that their picturesqueness and " fine 
writing " are a little in excess. 

The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 



The Cambridge Scholars. 153 

hinged upon the antislavery struggle. In this " irrepressible 
conflict " Massachusetts led the van. Garrison had written 
in his Liberator, in 1830 : *' I will be as harsh as truth and 
as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest ; I will not 
equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will not retreat a single 
inch ; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolition- 
ists remained for a long time, even in the North, a small 
and despised faction. It was a great point gained when 
men of education and social standing, like Wendell Phil- 
lips (1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), joined them- 
selves to the cause. Both of these were graduates of Har- 
vard and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the 
representative orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on 
the platform and Sumner in the Senate. The former first 
came before the public in his fiery speech, delivered in Fan- 
euil Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting called to de- 
nounce the naurder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at 
Alton, 111., while defending his press against a pro-slavery 
mob. Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf 
of the slave. His eloquence was impassioned and direct, 
and his English singularly pure, simple, and nervous. 
He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other 
American orator. He was a most fascinating platform 
speaker on themes outside of politics, and his lecture on 
"The Lost Arts" was a favorite with audiences of all 
sorts. 

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered 
politics reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless 
leading of his conscience. He was a student of literature 
and art ; a connoisseur of engravings, for example, of which 
he made a valuable collection. He was fond of books, con- 
versation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while still a 
young man, had made a remarkable impression in society. 
But he left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as 



154 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Webster's successor to the Senate of the United States. 
Thereafter he remained the leader of the abolitionists in 
Congress until slavery was abolished. His Influence 
throughout the North was greatly increased by the brutal 
attack upon him in the Senate chamber in 1856 by " Bully 
Brooks " of South Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately 
and somewhat labored. While speaking he always seemed, 
as has been wittily said, to be surveying a " broad land- 
scape of his own convictions." His most impressive quali- 
ties as a speaker were his intense moral earnestness and his 
thorough knowledge of his subject. The most telling of 
his parliamentary speeches are perhaps his speech " On the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill," of February 3, 1854, and " On the 
Crime against Kansas," May 19 and 20, 1856 ; of his plat- 
form addresses, the oration on "The True Grandeur of 
Nations." 

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : "Voices of the 
Night"; "The Skeleton in Armor"; " The Wreck of the 
Hesperus"; "The Village Blacksmith"; "The Belfry of 
Bruges, and Other Poems" (1846); " By the Seaside "; "Hia- 
watha"; " Tales of a Wayside Inn." 

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. I. Prose : "Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table"; "Elsie Venner." II. Verse: "Old 
Ironsides"; "The Last Leaf"; "My Aunt"; "The Music- 
Grinders"; "On Lending a Punch-Bowl"; "Nux Post- 
coenatica"; "A Modest Request " ; " The Living Temple " ; 
" Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College "; " Homesick 
in Heaven"; "Epilogue to the Breakfast Table Series"; 
"The Boys "; " Dorothy Q."; " The Iron Gate." 

3. James Russell Lowell. I. Verse : " The Biglow 
Papers" (two series); "Under the Willows and Other 
Poems " (1868); " Rhoecus " ; " The Shepherd of King Ad- 
metus"; "The Vision of Sir Launfal"; "The Present 



The Cambridge Scholars. 155 

Crisis"; " The Dandelion " ; "The Birch Tree"; "Beaver 
Brook." II. Prose: "Chaucer"; "Shakespeare Once 
More"; " Dryden" ; "Emerson, the Lecturer"; " Tho- 
reau"; "My Garden Acquaintance"; "A Good Word for 
Winter"; "A Certain Condescension in Foreigners"; 
" Democracy." 

4. William Hickling Prescott: "The Conquest of 
Mexico." 

5. John Lothrop Motley : * ' The United Netherlands. ' ' 

6. Francis Parkman: "The Oregon Trail"; "The 
Jesuits in North America." 

7. " Kepresentative American Orations," volume V. 
Edited by Alexander Johnston. New York : 1884. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Literature in the Cities —1837-1861. 

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the 
United States until very recently. Even now the number 
of those who support themselves by purely literary work is 
small, although the growth of the reading public and the 
establishment of great magazines, such as Harper^s, The 
Century^ and The Atlantic^ have made a marivct for intel- 
lectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a 
godsend to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men 
of genius like Hawthorne. About 1840, two Philadelphia 
magazines — Godey^s Lady^s Book and Graham) s Monthly — 
began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price 
then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine of 
the modern type was Harper^ 8 Monthly^ founded in 1850. 
Until 1891 American books suflTered from the want of an 
international copyright, which flooded the country with 
cheap reprints and translations of foreign works, with 
which the domestic product was unable to contend on such 
uneven terms. With the first ocean steamers there started 
up a class of large-paged weeklies in New York and else- 
where, such as Brother Jonathan^ The New World, and The 
Corsair^ which furnished their readers with the freshest 
waitings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities 
within a fortnight after their appearance in London. Tliis 
still further restricted the profits of native authors and 
nearly drove them from the field of periodical literature. 
By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray and other 
English writers were printed in Harper^s in installments 

156 



Literature in the Cities. 157 



simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals. 
The Atlantic was the first of our magazines which was 
founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, 
and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was 
the profession which naturally attracted men of letters, as 
having most in common with their chosen work and as 
giving them a medium, under their own control, through 
which they could address the public. A few favored schol- 
ars, like Prescott, were made independent by the possession 
of private fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and 
Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they could get in 
the intervals of an active profession or of college work. 
Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the 
country and making their modest competence— eked out in 
Emerson's case by lecturing here and there— suffice for their 
simple needs, secured themselves freedom from the restraints 
of any regular calling. But, in default of some such pou 
sto, our men of letters have usually sought the cities and 
allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered 
that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own ac- 
count, and that he afterward edited The Atlantic and The 
North American. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana 
betook themselves to journalism after the break-up of the 
Brook Farm Community. 

In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the 
earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew 
him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a 
livelihood by conducting a daily newspaper ; or, as he him- 
self puts it, was 

*' Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, 

And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." 

Bryant was born at Cummington, Massachusetts. After two 

years in Williams College he studied law, and practiced for 

nine years as a country lawyer in Plainfield and Great Bar- 



158 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

rington. Following the line of the Housatonic Valley, the 
social and theological affiliations of Berlishire have always 
been closer with Connecticut and New Yorli than with Bos- 
ton and eastern Massachusetts. Accordingly, when in 1825 
Bryant yielded to the attractions of a literary career, he be- 
took himself to New York City, where, after a brief experi- 
ment in conducting a montlily magazine, the Neiu York 
Review and Athenaeum, he assumed the editorship of the 
Evening Post, a Democratic and free-trade journal, with 
which he remained connected till his death. He already 
had a reputation as a poet when he entered the ranks of 
metropolitan journalism. In 1816 his " Thanatopsis " had 
been published in the North American Review, and had at- 
tracted immediate and general admiration. It had been 
finished, indeed, two years before, when the poet w^as only 
in his nineteenth year, and w^as a wonderful instance of 
precocity. The thought in this stately hymn was not that 
of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected long upon 
the universality, the necessity, and the majesty of death. 
Bryant's blank verse when at its best, as in " Thanatopsis" 
and the "Forest Hymn," is extremely noble. In gravity 
and dignity it is surpassed by no English blank verse of 
this century, though in rich and various modulation it falls 
below Tennyson's "Ulj^sses" and " Morte d' Arthur." It 
was characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus 
early into possession of his faculty. His range was always 
a narrow one, and about his poetry, as a whole, there is a 
certain coldness, rigidity, and solemnity. His fixed position 
among American poets is described in his ow^n "Hymn to 
the North Star": 

" And thou dost see them rise. 
Star of the pole ! and thou dost see them set. 

Alone, in thy cold skies, 
Thou keep'st thy old, unmoving station yet, 



Literature in the Cities. 159 

Nor join' st the dances of that glittering train, 

Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main." 

In 1821 he read "The Ages," a didactic poem, in thirty- 
five stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cam- 
bridge, and in the same year brought out his first volume 
of poems. A second collection appeared in 1832, which was 
printed in London under the auspices of Washington 
Irving. Bryant was the first American poet who had much 
of an audience in England, and Wordsworth is said to have 
learned " Thanatopsis " by heart. Bryant was, indeed, in 
a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's school, and his 
place among American poets corresponds roughly, though 
not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With 
no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little 
flexibility or openness to new impressions, but gifted with 
a high, austere imagination, Bryant became the meditative 
poet of nature. His best poems are those in which he 
draws lessons from nature, or sings of its calming, purify- 
ing, and bracing influences upon the human soul. His of- 
fice, in other words, is the same which Matthew Arnold 
asserts to be the peculiar office of modern poetry, "the 
moral interpretation of nature." Poems of this class are 
" Green River," " To a Waterfowl," " June," " The Death 
of the Flowers," and "The Evening Wind." The song, 
" O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than 
is common in Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best 
poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's " Three 
years she grew in sun and shower," and both of these name- 
less pieces might fitly be entitled — as Wordsworth's is in 
Mr. Pal grave's "Golden Treasury "—" The Education of 
Nature." 

Although Bryant's career is identified with New York 
his poetry is all of New England. His heart was always 
turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berk- 



160 Initial Studies in American Letter's. 

shire Hills. There was nothing of that urban strain in him 
which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, 
the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New 
England Indian Summer, that season of " dropping nuts" 
and " smoky light," to whose subtle analogy with the de- 
cay of the 3^oung by the New England disease, consump- 
tion, he gave such tender expression in " The Death of the 
Flowers," and amid whose *' bright, late quiet " he wished 
himself to pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the melan- 
choly days," as Lowell is of June. If, by chance, he touches 
upon June, it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell 
in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day 
that is 

" simply perfect from its own resource, 

As to the bee the new campanula's 

Illuminate seclusion swung in air." 

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant 
by contrast the thought of death ; and there is nowhere in 
his poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing 
stanzas of " June," in which he speaks of himself by antici- 
pation, as of one 

" Whose part in all the pomp that fills 
The circuit of the summer hills 
Is — that his grave is green." 

Bryant is, par excellence, the poet of New England wild 
flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian — to each of 
which he dedicated an entire poem — the orchis and the 
golden-rod, " the aster in the wood and the yellow sun- 
flower by the brook." With these his name will be asso- 
ciated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser 
celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora. 

Except when writing of nature he was apt to be common- 
place, and there are not many such energetic lines in his 
purely reflective verse as these famous ones from " The 
Battle-Field " : 



Literature in the Cities. 161 

" Truth crushed to earth shall rise again ; 

The eternal years of God are hers ; 
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, 

And dies among his worshipers." 
He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publish- 
ing a new collection in 1840, another in 1844, and *' Thirty 
Poems "in 1864. His work at kll ages was remarkably even. 
** Thanatopsis" was as mature as anything that he wrote 
afterward, and among his later pieces " The Planting of the 
Apple-tree" and ^'The Flood of Years " were as fresh as 
anything that he had written in the first flush of youth. 
Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, without 
any tincture of affectation or extravagance. His prose writ- 
ings are not important, consisting mainly of papers of the 
" Salmagundi " variety contributed to The Talisman^ an an- 
nual published in 1827-30 ; some rather sketchy stories, 
"Tales of the Glauber Spa," 1832; and impressions of 
Europe, entitled " Letters of a Traveler," issued in two 
series, in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his 
blank-verse translations of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," a 
remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and not ex- 
celled, upon the whole, by any recent metrical version of 
Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's half-century of 
service as the editor of a daily paper should not be over- 
looked. The Evening Post^ under his management, was 
always honest, gentlemanly, and courageous, and did much 
to raise the tone of journalism in New York. 

Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston 
coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at jour- 
nalism, was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). He was 
born in a solitary farm-house near Haverhill, in the valley 
of the Merrimack, and his life was j)assed mostly at his native 
place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local 
color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the 
Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at 



162 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Nevvburyport, a region of hillside farms, opening out below 
into wide niarslies — " the low, green prairies of the sea" — 
and the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The scenery 
of the Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier : the 
cotton-spinning towns along its banks, with tlieir factories 
and dams, tlie sloping pastures and orchards of the back 
country, the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of 
water meadow between which glide the broad-sailed " gun- 
dalows" — a local corruption of gondola— laden with hay. 
Wliittier was a farmer lad, and had only such education as 
the district school could supply, supplemented by two years 
at the Haverhill Academy. In his " School Days " he gives 
a picture of the little old country schoolhouse as it used to 
be, the only alma mater of so many distinguished Ameri- 
cans, and to which many others who have afterward trod- 
den the pavements of great universities look back so fondly, 
as to their first wicket gate into the land of knowledge. 

" Still sits the schoolhouse by the xoad, 

A ragged beggar sunning ; 
Around it still the sumachs grow 

And blackberry vines are running. 

" Within the master's desk is seen, 

Deep- scarred by raps official ; 
The warping floor, the battered seats, 

The jack-knife's carved initial." 

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instincts in the 
young poet, and he began to contribute verses to Garrison's 
Free Press, published in Newburyport, and to the Haverhill 
Gazette. Then he went to Boston, and became editor for a 
short time of the Manvfacturer. Next he edited tlie Essex 
Gazette, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of George 
D. Prentice's paper, the New England Weekly Beview, at 
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut 
poet of much promise, J. G. C. Braiuard, editor of the Con- 
necticut Mirror, whose "Remains" Whittier edited in 1832. 



Literature in the Cities. 163 

At Hartford, too, he published his first booli, a vokime of 
prose and verse, entitled "Legends of New England," 1831, 
which is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his 
early interest in Indian colonial traditions — especially those 
which had a touch of the supernatural,— a mine which he 
afterward worked to good purpose in " The Bridal of Pen- 
nacook," "The Witch's Daughter," and similar poems. 
Some of the legends testify to Brainard's influence and to 
the influence of Whittier's temporary residence at Hartford. 
One of the prose pieces, for example, deals with the famous 
"Moodus Noises" at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, 
and one of the poems is the same in subject with Brainard's 
" Black Fox of Salmon River." After a year and a half at 
Hartford Whittier returned to Haverhill and to farming. 

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into 
this he threw himself with all the ardor of his nature. He 
became the poet of the reform, as Garrison was its apostle 
and Sumner and Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published 
"Justice and Expediency," a prose tract against slavery, 
and in the same year he took part in the formation of the 
American Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in 
the convention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. 
Whittier was a Quaker, and that denomination, influenced 
by the preaching of John Woolman and others, had long 
since quietly abolished slavery within its own communion. 
The Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an earnest 
though peaceful part in the Garrisouian movement. But it 
was a strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted 
Whittier a Friend. His poems against slavery and disunion 
have the martial ring of aTyrtseus or a Korner, added to the 
stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They are like 
the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jericho, 
or the i)salms of David denouncing woe upon the enemies 
of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan 



164 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

strain in American poetry it is in the war hymns of the 
Quaker " Hermit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems 
there were three principal collections: "Voices of Free- 
dom," 1849 ; " The Panorama, and Other Poems," 1856 ; and 
" In War Time," 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of free- 
dom was done when, on liearing tlie bells ring for the pas- 
sage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he 
wrote his splendid " Laus Deo," thrilling with the ancient 
Hebrew spirit : 

" Loud and long 
Lift the old exulting song, 
Sing with Miriam by the sea — 
He has cast the mighty down, 

Horse and rider sink and drown, 
He hath triumphed gloriously." 

Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the Civil 
War, the best, or at all events the most jDopular, is " Barbara 
Frietchie." " Ichabod," expressing the indignation of the 
Free Soilers at Daniel Webster's seventh of March speech 
in defense of the Fugitive Slave Law, is one of Whittier's 
best political poems, and not altogether unworthy of com- 
parison with Browning's *' Lost Leader." The language of 
Whittier's warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely 
devotional pieces are religious poetry of a high order and 
have been included in numerous collections of hymns. Of 
his songs of faith and doubt, the best are perhaps "Our 
Master," " Chapel of the Hermits," and " Eternal Good- 
ness "; one stanza from the last of which is familiar : 

*' I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded pahns in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to 
sing the homely life of the New England country-side. His 
rural ballads and idyls are as genuinely American as any- 



Literature in the Cities. 165 

thing that our poets have written, and have been recom- 
mended, as SLicli, to English workingmen by Wiiittier's co- 
religionist, John Bright. The most popular of these is 
probably " Maud Muller," whose closing couplet has passed 
into proverb. " Skipj^er Ireson's Ride " is also very current. 
Better than either of them, as poetry, is " Telling the Bees." 
But Whittier's masterpiece in work of a descriptive and 
reminiscent kind is "Snow-Bound," 1866, a New England 
fireside id^^l which, in its truthfulness, recalls the " Winter 
Evening" of Cowper's "Task" and Burns's "Cotter's 
Saturday Night," but in sweetness and animation is su- 
perior to either of them. Although in some things a Puri- 
tan of the Puritans, Whittier has never forgotten that he is 
also a Friend, and several of his ballads and songs have been 
upon the subject of the early Quaker persecutions in Massa- 
chusetts. The most impressive of these is "Cassandra South- 
wick." The latest of them, " The King's Missive," origi- 
nally contributed to the " Memorial History of Boston " in 
1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume with other 
poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively controversy. 
"The Bridal of Pennacook," 1848, and "The Tent on the 
Beach," 1867, which contain some of his best work, were 
series of ballads told by different narrators, after the fashion 
of Longfellow's " Tales of a Wayside Inn." As an artist in 
verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than delicate 
or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms — by preference 
the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet — 

" Maud Muller on a summer's day 
Raked the meadow sweet with bay," 

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very mo- 
notonous, as do some of Whittier's mannerisms, which pro- 
ceed, however, never from affectation, but from a lack of 
study and varietj^, and so, no doubt, in part from the want 
of that academic culture and thorough technical equipment 



166 Initial Studies in Amer-ican Letters. 

which Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems 
are not in dialect, like Lowell's ''Biglow Papers," he knows 
how to make an artistic use of homely provincial words, 
such as " chore," which give his idyls of the hearth and the 
barnyard a genuine Doric cast. Whittier's prose is inferior 
to his verse. The fluency which was a besetting sin of his 
poetry, when released from the fetters cf rhyme and meter, 
ran into wordiness. His prose writings were partly contri- 
butions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical 
sketches of English and American reformers, and partly 
studies of the scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimack Val- 
ley. Those of most literary interest were the " Supernatur- 
alism of New England," 1847, and some of the papers in 
" Literary Recreations and Miscellanies," 1854. 

While Massachusetts was creating an American literature, 
other sections of the Union were by no means idle. The 
West, indeed, was as yet too raw to add anything of im- 
portance to the artistic product of the country. The South 
was hampered by circumstances which will presently be de- 
scribed. But in and about the seaboard cities of New York, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were 
busy filling the columns of literary weeklies and monthlies ; 
and there was a considerable output, such as it was, of 
books of poetry, fiction, travel, and miscellaneous light 
literature. Time has already relegated most of these to the 
dusty top shelves. To rehearse the names of the numerous 
contributors to the old Knickerbocker Magazine^ to Godey^s 
and Grahara's and the New Mirror^ and the Southern Liter- 
ary Messenger^ or to run over the list of authorlings and 
poetasters in Poe's papers on the " Literati of New York," 
would be very much like reading the inscriptions on the 
headstones of an old graveyard. In the columns of these 
prehistoric magazines and in the book notices and reviews 
away back in the thirties and forties, one encounters the 



Literature in the Cities. 167 

handiwork and the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, 
Hawthorne, and Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten 
literature. It would have required a good deal of critical 
acumen, at the time, to predict that these and a few others 
would soon be thrown out into bold relief, as the significant 
and permanent names in the literature of their generation, 
while Paulding, Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores 
of others who figured beside them in the fashionable period- 
icals, and filled quite as large a space in the public eye, 
would sink into oblivion in less than thirty years. Some 
of these latter were clever enough people ; they entertained 
their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had 
no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority 
of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, 
and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly 
sifting out the few representative books which shall carry 
on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then 
it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, 
even at the moment that it sees the light, that it is destined 
to endure. But tastes and fashions change, and few things 
are better calculated to inspire the literary critic with hu- 
mility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see 
how the future, now become the present, has quietly given 
them the lie. 

From among the professional litterateurs of his day 
emerges, with ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the 
name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). By the irony of fate 
Poe was born at Boston, and his first volume, " Tamerlane, 
and Other Poems," 1827, was printed in that city and bore 
upon its title-page the words, " By a Bostoniau." But his 
parentage, so far as it was anything, was southern. His 
father was a Marylander who had gone upon the stage and 
married an actress, herself the daughter of an actress and a 
native of England. Left an orphan by the early death of 



168 Initial Studies in Atnerican Letters. 

both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy 
merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an 
English school, was student for a time in the University of 
Virginia, and afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at 
West Point. His youth was wild and irregular : he gam- 
bled and drank ; was proud, bitter, and perverse ; finally 
quarreled with his guardian and adopted father — by whom 
he was disowned — and then betook himself to the life of a 
literary hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various 
periodicals soon brought him into notice, and he was given 
the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, published 
at Richmond, and subsequently of the Oentlemen's — after- 
ward Graharn's — Magazine in Philadelphia. These and 
all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated hab- 
its and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to 
New York, where he found employment on the Evening 
Mirror and then on the Broadway Journal. He died of de- 
lirium tremens at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore. His 
life was one of the most wretched in literary histor^^ He 
was an extreme instance of what used to be called the 
"eccentricity of genius." He hud the irritable vanity 
which is popularly supposed to accompany the poetic tem- 
perament, and was so insanely egotistic as to imagine that 
Longfellow and others were constantly plagiarizing from 
him. The best side of Poe's character came out in his do- 
mestic relations, in which he displayed great tenderness, 
patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly, and 
his manner and conversation were often winning. In the 
place of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In 
his critical papers, except where warped by passion or 
prejudice, he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad 
work by the mo^t illustrious hands and commending ob- 
scure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed 
each other's books ; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings 



Literature in the Cities. 169 

who manufactured verses for the *' Annu'^Js"; and the 
twaddle of the " genial " ineapables who praised them in 
flabby reviews — all these Poe exposed with ferocious hon- 
esty. Nor, though his writings are i^nmoral, can they be 
called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its 
unearthliness as Bryant's in its austerity. 

By 1831 Poe had published three thin books of verse, 
none of which had attracted notice, although the latest 
contained the drafts of a few of his most perfect poems, 
such as " Israfel," " The Valley of Unrest," " The City in 
the Sea," and one of the two pieces inscribed " To Helen." 
It was his habit to touch and retouch his work until it 
grew under his more practiced hand into a shape that 
satisfied his fastidious taste. Hence the same poem fre- 
quently reappears in different stages of development in 
successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist in the realm of 
the weird and the fantastic. In his intellectual nature 
there was a strange conjunction ; an imagination as spirit- 
ual as Shelley's, though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetu- 
ally with shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin ; with 
this, an analytic power, a scientific exactness, and a me- 
chanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathema- 
tician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism 
of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and 
musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the 
selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and 
the vowels varied. In his " Philosophy of Composition " 
he described how his best-known poem, "The Raven," 
was systematically built up on a preconceived plan, in 
which the number of lines was first determined and the 
word " nevermore " selected as a starting-point. No one 
who knows the mood in which poetry is composed will be- 
lieve that this ingenious piece of dissection really describes 
the way in which " The Raven " was conceived and writ- 



170 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

ten, or that any such deliberate and self-conscious process 
could originate the associations from which a true poem 
springs. But it flattered Poe's pride of intellect to assert 
that his cooler reason had control not only over the exe- 
cution of his poetry, but over the very well-head of thought 
and emotion. 

Some of his most successful stories, like *' The Gold 
Bug," " The Mystery of Marie Roget,'' " The Purloined 
Letter," and *' The Murders in the Rue Morgue," were ap- 
plications of this analytic faculty to the solution of puz- 
zles, such as the finding of buried treasure or of a lost 
document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious crime. 
After the publication of ** The Gold Bug " he received from 
all parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, which 
he delighted to work out. Others of his tales were clever 
pieces of mystification, like "Hans Pfaall," the story of a 
journey to the moon, or experiments at giving verisimili- 
tude to wild improbabilities by the skilful introduction of 
scientific details, as in " The Facts in the Case of M. Valde- 
mar" and "Von Kempelen's Discovery." In his narra- 
tives of this kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of 
Gaboriau and Wilkie Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules 
Verne, and, though in a less degree, the artfully worked up 
likeness to fact in Edward Everett Hale's "Man Without 
a Country," and similar fictions. While Dickens's "Barnaby 
Rudge " was publishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a 
plot-hunter by publishing a paper in Qrahara's Magazine 
in which the very tangled intrigue of the novel was cor- 
rectly raveled and the finale predicted in advance. 

In his union of imagination and analytic power Poe re- 
sembled Coleridge, who, if any one, w^as his teacher in 
poetry and criticism. Poe's verse often reminds one of 
"Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner," still oftener of 
" Kubla Khan." Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times 



Literature in the Cities. 171 

in the opium biibit. But in Poe the artist predominated 
over everytliing else. He began not with sentiment or 
tliought, but with technique, with melody and color, tricks 
of language, and effects of verse. It is curious to study the 
growth of his style in his successive volumes of poetry. At 
first these are metrical experiments and vague images, 
original, and with a fascinating suggestiveness, but with so 
little meaning that some of his earlier pieces are hardly re- 
moved from nonsense. Gradually, like distant music draw- 
ing nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes fuller of imagi- 
nation and of an inward significance, without ever losing, 
however, its mj^sterious aloofness from the real world of 
the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed — formed 
upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set 
forth with a great display of a priori reasoning in his essay 
on ''The Poetic Principle '' and elsewhere — that pleasure, 
and not instruction or moral exhortation, was the end of 
poetry ; that beauty, and not truth or goodness, was its 
means ; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it gave 
should be indefinite. About his own poetry there was 
always this indefiniteuess. His imagination dwelt in a 
strange country of dream — a "ghoul-haunted region of 
Weir," ''out of space, out of time"— filled with unsub- 
stantial landscapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And 
yet there is a wonderful, hidden significance in this un- 
canny scenery. The reader feels that the wild, fantasmal 
imagery is in itself a kind of language, and that it in some 
way expresses a brooding thought or passion, the terror and 
despair of a lost soul. Sometimes there is an obvious alle- 
gory, as in " The Haunted Palace," which is the parable of 
a ruined mind, or in " The Raven," the most popular of all 
Poe's poems, originally published in the American Whig 
Review for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is 
more obscure, as in " Ulalume," which, to most people, is 



172 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

quite incomprehensible and yet, to all readers of poetic 
feeling, is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, 
the most fascinating of its author's creations. 

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad "Annabel Lee," 
and "To One in Paradise," the poet emerges into the light 
of common human feeling and speaks a more intelligible 
language. But in general his poetry is not the poetry of 
the heart, and its passion is not the passion of flesh and 
blood. In Poe the thought of death is always near, and of 
the shadowy borderland between death and life. 

" The play is the tragedy ' Man,' 

And its hero the Conqueror Worm." 

The prose tale, " Ligeia," in which these verses are inserted, 
is one of the most powerful of all Poe's writings, and its 
theme is the power of the will to overcome death. In that 
singularly impressive poem, "The Sleeper," the morbid 
horror which invests the tomb springs from the same source, 
the materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let 
the soul go free from the body. 

This quality explains why Poe's " Tales of the Grotesque 
and Arabesque," 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's 
romances, to which a few of them, like "William Wilson " 
and "The Man of the Crowd," have some resemblance. 
The former of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's pecu- 
liar province, the allegory of the conscience. But in gen- 
eral the tragedy in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe 
calls in the aid of material forces. The passion of physical 
fear or of superstitious horror is that w^hicli his writings 
most frequently excite. These tales represent various grades 
of the frightful and the ghastly, from the mere bugaboo 
story like "The Black Cat," wiiich makes children afraid 
to go in the dark, up to the breathless terror of " The Cask 
of Amontillado " or " The Red Death." Poe's masterpiece 
in this kind is the fateful tale of " The Fall of the House of 



Literature in the Cities. 173 

Usher," with its solemn and magnificent close. His prose, 
at its best, often recalls, in its richly imaginative cast, the 
manner of De Quincey in such passages as his " Dream 
Fugue " or " Our Ladies of Sorrow." In descriptive pieces 
like "The Domain of Arnheim," and stories of adventure 
like " The Descent into the Maelstrom," and his long sea- 
tale, " The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," 1838, he dis- 
played a realistic inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or 
De Foe's. He was not without a mocking irony, but he 
had no constructive humor, and his attempts at the facetious 
were mostly failures. 

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took 
no hold upon the life about him and cared nothing for the 
public concerns of his country. His poems and tales might 
have been written in vacuo for anything American in them. 
Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame has been so cosmo- 
politan. In France especially his writings have been favor- 
ites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the "Fleurs de 
Mai," translated them into French, and his own impressive 
but unhealthy ppetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. 
The defect in Poe was in character — a defect which will make 
itself felt in art as in life. If he had had the sweet home 
feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he 
might have been a greater poet than either. 

•' If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky ! " 

Though Poe was a southerner, if not by birth, at least by 
race and breeding, there was nothing distinctly southern 
about his peculiar genius, and in his wandering life he was 
associated as much with Philadelphia and New York as 



174 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

with Baltimore and Richmond. The conditions which had 
made tlie southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educa- 
tional works before the Revolution continued to act down to 
the time of the Civil War. Eli Whitney's invention of the 
cotton-gin in the closing years of the last century gave ex- 
tension to slavery, making it profitable to cultivate the new 
staple by enormous gangs of field-hands working under the 
whip of the overseer in large plantations. Slavery became 
henceforth a business speculation in the states farthest 
south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a com- 
paratively mild domestic system. The necessity of defend- 
ing its peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing 
faction in the North compelled the South to throw all its 
intellectual strength into politics, which, for that matter, is 
the natural occupation and excitement of a social aristoc- 
racy. Meanwhile immigration sought the free states, and 
there was no middle class at the South. The " poor whites " 
were ignorant and degraded. There were people of educa- 
tion in the cities and on some of the plantations, but there 
was no great educated class from which a literature could 
proceed. And the culture of the South, such as it was, was 
becoming old-fashioned and local, as the section was isolated 
more and more from the rest of the Union and from the en- 
lightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary preju- 
dices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. 
Nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than 
the sophomorical editorials in the southern press just before 
the outbreak of the war, or than the backward and ill- 
informed articles which passed for reviews in the poorly 
supported periodicals of the South. 

In the general dearth of work of high and permanent 
value, one or two southern authors may be mentioned whose 
writings have at least done something to illustrate the life 
and scenery of their section. ^Vhen in 1833 the Baltimore 



Literature in the Cities. 175 

Saturday Visitor offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the 
best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize 
to Poe's first stor^^, "The MS. Found in a Bottle," was 
John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who 
afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's ad- 
ministration. The year before he had published " Swallow 
Barn," a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Vir- 
ginia. In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, 
" Horse-Shoe Robinson " and "Rob of the Bowl," the for- 
mer a story of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, 
the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland. These 
had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852. 
But the most popular and voluminous of all southern 
writers of fiction was William Gilmore Sirams, a South 
Carolinian, who died in 1870. He wrote over thirty novels, 
mostly romances of revolutionary history, southern life, 
and wild adventure, among the best of which were "The 
Partisan," 1835, and "The Yemassee." Simms was an in- 
ferior Cooper with a difference. His novels are good boys' 
books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was 
strongly southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, 
the Charleston City Gazette^ took part against the nullifiers. 
His miscellaneous writings include several histories and bi- 
ographies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers con- 
tributed to southern magazines. He also wrote numerous 
poems, the most ambitious of which was "Atlantis, a Story 
of the Sea," 1832. His poems have little value except as 
here and there illustrating local scenery and manners, as in 
•'Southern Passages and Pictures," 1839. Mr. John Esten 
Cooke's pleasant but not very strong "Virginia Comedians" 
was, perhaps, in literary quality the best southern novel 
produced before the Civil War. 

When Poe came to New York, the most conspicuous liter- 
ary figure of the metropolis, with the possible exception of 



Initial Studies in AfneiHcan Letiers, 



Bryant and Halleck, was N. P. Willis, one of the editors of 
the Evening Mirror^ upon which journal Poe was for a time 
engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, when a 
student at Yale, by his " Scripture Poems," written in 
smooth blank verse. Afterward he had edited the American 
Monthly in his native city of Boston, and more recently he 
had published " Pencillings by the Way," 1835, a pleasant 
record of European saunterings ; " Inklings of Adventure," 
1836, a collection of dashing stories and sketches of Ameri- 
can and foreign life ; and " Letters from Under a Bridge," 
1839, a series of charming rural letters from his country 
place at Owego, on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always 
graceful and sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though 
light in substance and jaunty in style, had quickly raised 
him to the summit of popularity. During the years from 1835 
to 1850 he was the most successful American magazinist, and 
even down to the day of his death, in 1867, he retained his 
hold upon the attention of the fashionable public by his easy 
paragraphing and correspondence in the Mirror and its suc- 
cessor, the Home Journal^ which catered to the literary wants 
of the beau monde. Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, 
though clever of its kind, but a few of his best tales and 
sketches, such as "F. Smith," "The Ghost Ball at Congress 
Hall," "Edith Linsey," and "The Lunatic's Skate," to- 
gether with some of the " Letters from Under a Bridge," 
are worthy of preservation, not only as readable stories, but 
as society studies of life at American watering-places like 
Nahant and Saratoga and Ballston Spa half a century ago. 
A number of his simpler poems, like "Unseen Spirits," 
" Sprin*^," " To M — from Abroad," and " Lines on Leaving 
Europe," still retain a deserved place in collections and 
anthologies. 

The senior editor of the Mirror, George P. Morris, was 
once a very popular song-writer, and his "Woodman, 



Literature in the Cities. 177 

Spare that Tree" still survives. Other residents of New- 
York City who have written single famous pieces were 
Clement C. Moore, a professor in the General Theological 
Seminary, whose " Visit from St. Nicholas" — " 'Twas the 
Night Before Christmas," etc. — is a favorite ballad in every 
nursery in the land ; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of 
reputation in his time, but now remembered only as the 
author of the song, " Sparkling and Bright," and the patri- 
otic ballad of " Monterey " ; Robert H. Messinger, a native 
of Boston, but long resident in New York, where he was a 
familiar figure in fashionable society, who wrote " Give Me 
the Old," a fine ode with a choice Horatian flavor ; and 
William Allen Butler, a lawj^er and occasional writer, 
whose capital satire of " Nothing to Wear" was published 
anonymously and had a great run. Of younger poets, like 
Stoddard, Stedman, and Aldrich (who formerly wrote for 
the Mirror), who are still living and working in the ma- 
turity of their powers, it is not within the limits and 
design of this sketch to speak. But one of their contem- 
poraries, Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at 
Berlin, in 1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rear- 
ing, may be reckoned among the " literati of New York." 
A farmer lad from Chester County, v/ho had learned the 
printer's trade and printed a little volume of his juvenile 
verses in 1844, he came to New York shortly after with cre- 
dentials from Dr. Griswold, the editor of Graham'' s ; and 
obtaining encouragement and aid from Willis, Horace 
Greeley, and others, he set out to make the tour of Europe, 
walking from tov/n to town in Germany and getting em- 
ployment now and then at his trade to help pay the ex- 
penses of the trip. The story of these " Wanderjahre " he 
told in his "Views Afoot," 1846. This was the first of 
eleven books of travel written during the course of his life. 
He was an inveterate nomad, and his journeyings carried 



178 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



^' 



him to the remotest regions — to California, India, China, 
Japan, and tlie isles of the sea, to Central Africa and the 
Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the "byways of 
Europe." His headquarters at home were in New York, 
where he did literary -svork for the Tribune. He was a 
rapid and incessant worker, throwing off* many volumes 
of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, 
and criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to 
the magazines. 

His versatility was very marked, and his poetry ranged 
from ''Rhymes of Travel," 1848, and "Poems of the 
Orient," 1854, to idyls and home ballads of Pennsylvania 
life, like "The Quaker Widow " and "The Old Pennsyl- 
vania Farmer" ; and on the other side to ambitious and 
somewhat mystical poems, like " The Masque of the Gods," 
1872 — written in four days, — and dramatic experiments like 
"The Prophet," 1874, and " Prince Deukalion," 1878. He 
was a man of buoyaiit and eager nature, with a great appe- 
tite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent for 
learning languages, and a too great readiness to take the 
hue of his favorite books. From his facility, his openness 
to external impressions of scenery and costume, and his 
habit of turning these at once into the service of his pen, 
it results that there is something " newspapery " and super- 
ficial about most of his prose. It is reporter's work, though 
reporting of a high order. His poetry, too, though full of 
glow and picturesqueness, is largely imitative, suggesting 
Tennyson not unfrequently, but more often Shelley. His 
spirited " Bedouin Song," for example, has an echo of 
Shelley's " Lines to an Indian Air " : 

" From the desert I come to thee 

On a stallion shod with fire ; 
And the winds are left behind 

In the speed of my desire. 
Under thy window I stand, 



Literature in the Cities. 179 

And the midnight hears my cry ; 
I love thee, I love but thee, 
With a love that shall not die." 

The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner 
of other poets made him an admirable parodist and transla- 
tor. His " Echo Ckib," 1876, contains some of the best trav- 
esties in the tongue, and his great translation of Goethe's 
"Faust," 1870-71 — with its wonderfully close reproduction 
of the original meters — is one of the glories of American 
literature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put 
first among our poets of the second generation — the genera- 
tion succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell— although 
the lack in him of original genius self-determined to a 
peculiar sphere, or the want of an inward fixity and con- 
centration to resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, 
has made him less significant in the history of our literary 
thought than some other writers less generously endowed. 

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were 
profuse, eloquent, and faulty. " John Godfrey's Fortune," 
1864, gave a picture of Bohemian life in New York. *' Han- 
nah Thurston," 1863, and "The Story of Kennett," 1866, 
introduced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker 
life of rural Pennsylvania, as Taylor remembered it in his 
boyhood. The former was like Hawthorne's "Blithedale 
Romance," a satire on fanatics and reformers, and its her- 
oine is a nobly conceived character, though drawn with 
some exaggeration. "The Story of Kennett," which is 
largely autobiographic, has a greater freshness and reality 
than the others, and is full of personal recollections. In 
these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill 
is greater, on the whole, than his power of creating char- 
acters or inventing plots. 

Literature in the West now began to have an existence. 
Another young poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, 



180 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Thomas Buchanan Read, went to Cincinnati, and not to 
New York, to study sculpture and painting, about 1837, and 
one of his best-known poems, " Pons Maximus," was writ- 
ten on the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge 
across the Oliio. Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and 
spent many years in our seaboard cities and in Italy. He 
was distinctly a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania 
pastorals, like " The Deserted Road," have a natural sweet- 
ness ; and his luxurious "Drifting," which combines the 
methods of painting and poetry, is justly popular. " Sheri- 
dan's Ride" — perhaps his most current piece — is a rather 
forced production, and has been overpraised. The two Ohio 
sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Gary, were attracted to New 
York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed as- 
sured. They made that city their home for the remainder 
of their lives. Poe praised Alice Gary's ** Pictures of Mem- 
ory," and Phoebe's '* Nearer Home " has become a favorite 
hymn. There is nothing peculiarly western about the verse 
of the Gary sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, 
and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame and 
diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many 
good women and dear to simple hearts. 

A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro melodies like 
"Uncle Ned," "O Susanna," "Old Folks at Home," "'Way 
Down South," "Nelly was a Lady," " My Old Kentucky 
Home," etc., which were the work, not of any southern 
poet, but of Stephen G. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., 
and a resident of Gincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed 
the words and music of these, and many others of a similar 
kind, during the years 1847 to 1861. Taken together they 
form the most original and vital addition which this country 
has made to the psalmody of the world, and entitle Foster 
to the first rank among American song-writers. 

As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and hu- 



I 



Literature in the Cities. 181 

mor of the plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe's ''Uncle Tom's Cabin," 1852, brought home 
to millions of readers the sufferings of the negroes in the 
" black belt " of the cotton-growing states. This is the most 
popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of thou- 
sands of copies were sold in this country and in England, 
and some forty translations were made into foreign tongues. 
In its dramatized form it still keeps the stage, and the sta- 
tistics of circulating libraries show that even now it is in 
greater demand than any other single book. It did more 
than any other literary agency to rouse the public conscience 
to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery ; more even 
than Garrison's Liberator ; more than the indignant poems 
of Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner and Phil- 
lips. It presented the thing concretely and dramatically, 
and in particular it made the odious Fugitive Slave Law 
forever impossible to enforce. It was useless for the de- 
fenders of slavery to protest that the picture was exagger- 
ated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. The 
system under which such brutalities could happen, and did 
sometimes happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point 
out defects of taste and art in this masterpiece, to show that 
the tone is occasionally melodramatic, that some of the char- 
acters are conventional, and that the literary execution is in 
parts feeble and in others coarse. In spite of all, it remains 
true that " Uncle Tom's Cabin " is a great book, the work 
of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and ut- 
tering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled 
the heart of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never 
repeated her first success. Some of her novels of New Eng- 
land life, such as "The Minister's Wooing," 1859, and 
"The Pearl of Orr's Island," 1862, have a mild kind of in- 
terest, and contain truthful portraiture of provincial ways 
and traits ; while later fictions of a domestic type, like 



182 Initial Studies in American Letters^ 

"Pink and White Tyranny " and "My Wife and I," are 
really beueatli criticism. 

There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with 
Mrs. Stowe : Mrs. L. H. Sigournej', for example, a Hart- 
ford poetess, formerly known as " the Hemans of America," 
but now quite obsolete ; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, 
a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of 
value, and whose naemory is preserved by one or two of his 
simpler poems, still in circulation, such as "To Seneca 
Lake" and "The Coral Grove." Another Hartford poet, 
Brainard — already spoken of as an early friend of Whittier, 
— died young, leaving a few pieces which show that his 
lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received 
little cultivation. A much younger writer than either of 
these, Donald G. Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting 
place in our literature, by virtue of his charmingly written 
"Reveries of a Bachelor," 1850, and "Dream Life," 1852, 
stories which sketch themselves out in a series of remi- 
niscences and lightly connected scenes, and which alwaj's 
appeal freshly to young men because they have that 
dreamy outlook upon life which is characteristic of youth. 
But, upon the whole, the most important contribution 
made by Connecticut in that generation to the literary 
stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher 
had been an influential preacher and theologian, and a 
sturdy defender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. 
Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more or less noted 
for intellectual vigor and independence, the most eminent 
were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, the great pulpit 
orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to 
give more than his spare moments to general literature. 
His sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported for the 
daily papers and printed in part in book form ; but these 
lose greatly when divorced from the large, warm, and 



I 



Literature in the Cities. 183 

benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up 
of articles in the Independent and the Ledger^ such as 
"Star Papers," 1855, and "Eyes and Ears," 1862, contain 
many delightful r)%orceaux upon country life and similar 
topics, though they are hardly wrought with sufficient 
closeness and care to take a permanent place in letters. 
Like Willis's " Ephemerae," they are excellent literary 
journalism, but hardly literature. 

We may close our retrospect of American literature before 
1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary 
phenomena of the time — the "Leaves of Grass" of Walt 
Whitman (1819-92), published at Brooklyn in 1855. The 
author, born at West Hills, Long Island, had been 
printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scrib- 
bled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which at- 
tracted little attention, but finding conventional rhymes 
and meters too cramping a vehicle for his need of expres- 
sion, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant of 
which the following is a fair specimen : 

"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, 

nourishing night ! 
Night of south winds ! night of the few large stars ! 
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night! " 

The invention was not altogether a new one. The English 
translation of the psalms of David and of some of the 
prophets, the " Poems of Ossian," and some of Matthew 
Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially "The Strayed Rev- 
eller," have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say noth- 
ing of the old Anglo-Saxon poems, like "Beowulf," and 
the Scripture paraphrases attributed to C£edmon. But this 
species of oratio soluia, carried to the lengths to which 
Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which was dis- 
pleasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar meas- 
ures and jingling rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness 



184 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and freedom. There is no consenting estimate of this 
poet. Many think that his so-called poems are not poems 
at all, but simply a bad variety of prose ; that there is 
nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and 
indecency ; and that the Whitman culte is a passing " fad " 
of a few literary men, and especially of a number of English 
critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, and Buchanan, who, being 
determined to have something unmistakably American — 
that is different from anything else — in writings from this 
side of the water, before they will acknowledge any origi- 
nality in them, have been misled into discovering in Whit- 
man "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he 
is the greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern 
poets ; that he is " cosmic," or universal, and that he has 
put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up 
into metrical feet. 

Whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or 
merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amor- 
phous impression which it makes on readers of conservative 
tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse ele- 
ments which poetry has usually left out— the ugly, the 
earthy, and even the disgusting ; the " under side of things," 
which he holds not to be prosaic when apprehended with a 
strong, masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their 
aspects. The lack of these elements in the conventional 
poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the 
salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blink- 
ing whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and ani- 
malism of some of the divisions in " Leaves of Grass," par- 
ticularly that entitled "Children of Adam," which gave 
great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness. Whit- 
man holds that nakedness is chaste ; that all the functions 
of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean ; that all, 
in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. 



Literature in the Cities. 185 

The effort to get everything into his poetry, to speak out his 
thought just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way 
of cataloguing objects without selection. His single ex- 
pressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and 
truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the full moon, 
just tinged with blue," of the "lisp " of the plain, of the 
prairies, " where herds of buflfalo make a crawling spread of 
the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction 
between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the 
poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these : 

"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck 

and ankles ; 
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed 

north." 

Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the 
future ; full of brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, 
gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his com- 
rade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the people — multitudes 
of people ; the swarm of life beheld from, a Broadway omni- 
bus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the negro 
truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentle- 
man and the scholar. "I loaf and invite my soul," he 
writes ; " I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the 
world." His poem "Walt Whitman," frankly egotistic, 
simply describes himself as a typical, average man — the 
same as any other man, and therefore not individual but 
universal. He has great tenderness and heartiness — "the 
good gray poet"; and during the Civil War he devoted 
himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the Wash- 
ington hospitals — an experience which he has related in 
"The Dresser" and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his 
rough and ready comradery to use slang and newspaper 
English in his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of Wal- 
ter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and with 



186 Initial Studies in American Letter 



a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers allege that 
he posed for effect ; that he is simply a backward eddy in 
the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against 
ultra civilization — like Thoreau, though in a different way. 
But with all his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, 
virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a 
great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times 
and countries. One likes to read him because he feels so 
good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such a 
lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the pros- 
pects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and repeti- 
tion, his ideas are not many. His indebtedness to Emerson 
— who wrote an introduction to the " Leaves of Grass"— is 
manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the individual 
differences of character, sentiment, and passion, the dra- 
matic elements of life, find small place in his system. It is 
too early to say what will be his final position in literary 
history. But it is noteworthy that the democratic masses 
have not accepted hhn yet as their poet. Whittier and 
Longfellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the 
darlings of the American people. The admiration, and 
even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, con- 
fined to the literary class. It is also not without signifi- 
cance as to the ultimate reception of his innovations in 
verse that he has numerous parodists, but no imitators. 
The tendency among our younger poets is not toward the 
abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the intro- 
duction of new stanza forms and an increasing carefulness 
and finish in the technique of their art. It is observable, 
too, that in his most inspired passages Whitman reverts to 
the old forms of verse ; to blank verse, for example, in the 
"Man-of- War Bird": 

" Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.; 



Literature in the Cities. 187 

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and 
pentameters : 

" Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river ! . . , 
Far-swooping, elbowed earth ! rich, apple-blossomed earth." 

Indeed, Whitman's m9st popular poem, "My Captain," 
written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, ditfers 
little in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will 
show : 

" My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will ; 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done ; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells I 

But I, with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck, my captain lies 
Fallen, cold and dead." 

This is from *' Drum Taps," a volume of poems of the Civil 
War. Whitman also wrote prose having much the same 
quality as his poetry : "Democratic Vistas," "Memoranda 
of the Civil War," and, more recently, "Specimen Days." 
His residence during his last years was at Camden, New 
Jersey, w^here a centennial edition of his writings was pub- 
lished in 1876. 



1. William Cullen Bryant: " Thanatopsis " ; "To a 
Waterfowl"; "Green River"; "Hymn to the North 
Star"; "A Forest Hymn"; "O Fairest of the Rural 
Maids" ; "June" ; "The Death of the Flowers" ; "The 
Evening Wind " ; " The Battle-Field " ; "The Planting of 
the Apple-tree" ; " The Flood of Years." 

2. John Greenleaf Whittier : " Cassandra South- 
wick" ; "The New Wife and the Old" ; "The Virginia 
Slave Mother"; "Randolph of Roanoke"; "Barclay of 
Ury"; "The Witch of Wenham " ; "Skipper Ireson's 
Ride"; "Marguerite"; "Maud Muller"; " Telling the 



188 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

Bees" ; "My Playmate" ; "Barbara Frietchie " ; " Icha- 
bod " ; " Laus Deo " ; '* Snow-Boiind." 

3. Edgar Allan Poe : " The Raven " ; " The Bells" ; 
" Israfel " ; '* TJlalume" ; " To Helen" ; " The City in tlie 
Sea"; "Annabel Lee"; *'To One in Paradise"; "The 
Sleeper"; "The Valley of Unrest"; "The Fall of the 
House of Usher " ; " Ligeia " ; " Wilham Wilson " ; " The 
Cask of Amontillado " ; " The Assignation"; " The Masque 
of the Red Death " ; " Narrative of A. Gordon Pym." 

4. N. P. Willis : " Select Prose Writings." New York: 
1886. 

5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe : " Uncle Tom's Cabin " ; " Old- 
town Folks." 

6. W. G. SIMMS : "The Partisan " ; " The Yemassee." 

7. Bayard Taylor : "A Bacchic Ode " ; "Hylas " j 
"Kubleh"; "The Soldier and the Pard"; "Sicilian 
Wine " ; " Taurus " ; " Serapion " ; " The Metempsychosia 
of the Pine " ; " The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled " ; 
" Bedouin Song" ; " Euphorion " ; " The Quaker Widow " ; 
"John Reid"; "Lars"; "Views Afoot"; "Byways of 
Europe " ; " The Story of Kennett " ; " The Echo Club." 

8. Walt Whitman : " My Captain " ; " When Lilacs 
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed " ; " Out of the Cradle End- 
lessly Rocking" ; "Pioneers, O Pioneers" ; "The Mystic 
Trumpeter " ; "A Woman at Auction " ; "Sea-shore Mem- 
oirs"; " Passage to India" ; " Man nahatta" ;" The Wound- 
Dresser " ; " Longings for Home." 

9. " Poets of America." By E. C. Stedman. Boston : 
1885. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Literature Since 1861. 

A generation has passed since the outbreak of the Civil 
War, and although public affairs are still mainly in the 
hands of men who had reached manhood before tlie conflict 
opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember 
clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily 
coming forward to take their places know it only by tra- 
dition. It makes a definite break in the history of our 
literature, and a number of new literary schools and tend- 
encies have appeared since its close. As to the literature 
of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had 
already reached or passed middle age. All of the more im- 
portant authors described in the last three chapters sur- 
vived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, 
who died in 1859, and Thoreau and Hawthorne, who died 
in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. 
The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not 
yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to 
come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, 
appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern 
side, Horace Greeley's "American Conflict," 1864-66, Vice- 
president Wilson's "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in 
America," and J. W. Draper's "American Civil War," 
1868-70 ; on the southern side, Alexander H. Stephens's 
" Confederate States of America," Jeflerson Davis's "Rise 
and Fall of the Confederate States of America," and E. A. 
Pollard's " Lost Cause." These, with the exception of Dr. 
Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of be- 

189 



190 Iniiicd Studies in American Letters. 

ing the work of actors in the political or military events 
which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, there- 
fore, partisan — in some instances passionately partisan. A 
storehouse of materials for the coming historian is also at 
hand in Frank Moore's great collection, "The Rebellion 
Record" ; in numerous regimental histories of special ar- 
mies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's "Army of 
the Potomac " ; in the autobiographies and recollections of 
Grant and Sherman and other military leaders ; in the 
" war papers," published in the Century Magazine^ and re- 
printed in book form, as " Battles and Leaders of the Civil 
War," 1887-89, and innumerable sketches and reminiscences 
by officers and privates on both sides. 

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general litera- 
ture, some of which have been mentioned in connection 
with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and 
some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new 
writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. 
There were war songs on both sides, few of which had much 
literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's south- 
ern ballad, "Maryland, My Maryland," sung to the old col- 
lege air of " Lauriger Horatius" ; and the grand martial 
chorus of " John Brown's Body," an old Methodist hymn, 
to which the northern armies beat time as they went 
"marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was 
marred by its fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and 
" minions " and " northern scum," the cheap insults of the 
southern newspaper press. To furnish the "John Brown" 
chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia AVard 
Howe wrote her " Battle Hymn of the Republic," a noble 
poem, but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so 
never fully accepted by the soldiers. 

Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and 
the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings 



Literature Since 1861. 191 

and home-comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, 
in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who 
had gone to the war ; or which celebrated individual deeds 
of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and 
heart-breaks of the great conflict, by far the greater num- 
ber were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the 
hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were 
Kate Putnam Osgood's " Driving Home the Cows," Mrs. 
Ethel Lynn Beers's "All Quiet Along the Potomac," For- 
ceythe Willson's " Old Sergeant," and John James Piatt's 
" Riding to Vote." Of the poets whom the war brought 
out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Tim- 
rod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of 
Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Con- 
federate Army of the West, as correspondent for the 
Charleston Mercury, and in 1864 he became assistant editor 
of the South Carolinian, at Columbia. Sherman's "march 
to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to 
Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was pub- 
lished in 1873, six j^ears after his death. The prettiest of 
all Timrod's poems is " Katie," but more to our present pur- 
pose are '* Charleston " — written in the time of blockade — 
and "The Unknown Dead," which tells 

" Of nameless graves on battle plains, 
Wash'd by a single winter's rains, 
Where, some beneath Virginian hills. 
And some by green Atlantic rills, 
Some by the Avaters of the West, 
A myriad unknown heroes rest." 

When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. 
Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful 
Decoration Day lyrio., "The Blue and the Gray," which 
spoke the word of reconciliation and consecration for North 
and South alike. 
Brownell, whose " Lyrics of a Day " and " War Lyrics " 



192 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private 
secretary to Farragut, on wliose flag-ship, tlie Hartford^ 
he was present at several great naval engagements, such as 
the "Passage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and the 
action off Mobile, described in his poem " The Bay Fight." 
With some roughness and unevenness of execution Brown- 
ell's poetry had a fire which places him next to Whittier as 
the Korner of the Civil War. In him, especially, as in 
Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the righteousness of his 
cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war to 
the crusaders against slavery : 

" Full red the furnace fires must glow 
That melt the ore of mortal kind : 
The mills of God are grinding slow, 
But ah, how close they grind ! 

" To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 
Are dread apostles of his name ; 
His kingdom here can only come 
By chrism of blood and flame." 

One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore 
Winthrop, hardly known as a writer until the publication 
in the Atlantic Monthly of his vivid sketches of " Washing- 
ton as a Camp," describing the march of his regiment, the 
famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the 
Capitol at Washington. A tragic interest was given to 
these papers by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of 
Big Bethel, June 10, 1861. While this was still fresh in 
public recollection his manuscript novels were published, 
together with a collection of his stories and sketches re- 
printed from the magazines. His novels, though in parts 
crude and immature, have a dash and buoyancy — an out- 
door air about them — which give the reader a winning im- 
pression of Winthrop's personality. The best of them is, 
perhaps, " Cecil Dreeme," a romance that reminds one a 
little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New 



Literature Since 1861. 193 

York University building on Wasliington Square, a locality 
that has been further celebrated in Henry James's novel of 
** Washington Square." 

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz 
James O'Brien, an Irishman by birth, who died at Balti- 
more in 1862 from the effects of a wound received in a cav- 
alry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a number 
of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among 
which the ''Diamond Lens" and "What Was It?" had 
something of Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another Irish- 
American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen-name of 
" Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the 
war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose 
writers of note furnished the magazines with narratives of 
their experience at the seat of war, among papers of which 
kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's "My Search for the 
Captain," in the Atlantic Monthly , and Col. T. W. Higgin- 
son's^Army Life in a Black Regiment," collected into a 
volume in 1870. 

Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is 
the ever memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the 
dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The 
war had brought the nation to its intellectual majority. In 
the stress of that terrible fight there was no room for 
buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and stump- 
speakers used to dole out in ante helium days. Lincoln's 
speech is short — a few grave words which he turned aside 
for a moment to speak in the midst of his task of saving 
the country. The speech is simple, naked of figures, every 
sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility for the 
work yet to be done and with a stern determination to do 
it. " In a larger sense," it says, " we cannot dedicate, we 
cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The 
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have con- 



194 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

secrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The 
world will little note nor long remember what we say here, 
but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the 
living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work 
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly ad- 
vanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the 
great task remaining before us ; that from these honored 
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which 
they gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here 
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; 
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of 
freedom ; and that government of the people, by the 
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 
Here was eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous 
perorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of Everett. 
As we read the plain, strong language of this brief classic, 
with its solemnity, its restraint, its ** brave old wisdom of 
sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features 
irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom — 

" The kindly- earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, tlie first American." 

Within the past quarter of a century the popular school 
of American humor has reached its culmination. Every 
man of genius who is a humorist at all is so in a way 
peculiar to himself. There is no lack of individuality in 
the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of 
Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject 
and application they are not new in kind. Irving, as we 
have seen, was the literary descendant of Addison. The 
character sketches in '* Bracebridge Hall" are of the same 
family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures of 
the Spectator Club. *' Knickerbocker's History of New 
York," though purely American in its matter, is not dis- 



Literature Since 1S61. 195 

tinctly American in its method, which is akin to tlie mock 
heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in " The Voyage 
to Lilliput." Irving's humor, like that of all the great 
English humorists, had its root in the perception of char- 
acter — of the characteristic traits of men and classes of 
men, as ground of amusement. It depended for its effect, 
therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and 
S3^mj)athy, as did the humor of Shakespeare, of Sterne, 
Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the character- 
istic, when j)ushed to excess, issues in grotesque and carica- 
ture, as in some of Dickens's inferior creations, which are 
little more than personified single tricks of manner, 
speech, feature, or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed 
from Irving's in temper but not in substance, and belonged, 
like Irving's, to the Euglish variety. Dr. Holmes's more 
pronouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically from 
the facctice of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is 
wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the 
heart. The same is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, 
whose " Biglow Papers," though humor of an original sort 
in their revelation of Yankee character, are essentially 
satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in 
the "Biglow Papers," their logical, that is, ivitty character, 
as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the atten- 
tion. They are funny, but they are not so funny as they 
are smart. 

In all these writers humor was blent with more serious 
qualities, which gave fineness and literary value to their 
humorous writings. Their view of life was not exclusively 
comic. But there has been a class of jesters, of professional 
humorists, in America, whose product ij so indigenous, so 
different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expres- 
sion, from any European humor, that it maybe regarded as 
a unique addition to the comic literature of the world. It 



196 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

lias been accepted as such in England, where Artemus 
Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have 
never read " The One-Hoss Shay" or " The Courtin'." And 
though it w^ould be ridiculous to maintain that either of 
these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to 
deny that there is an amount of flatness and coarseness in 
many of their labored fooleries which puts large portions of 
their writings below the line where real literature begins, 
still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even 
to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is 
true that no literary fashion is more subject to change than 
the fashion of a jest, and that jokes that make one genera- 
tion laugh seem insipid to the next. But there is something 
perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called " the 
great jester of France"; and though the puns of Shakes- 
peare's clowns are detestable, the clowns themselves have 
not lost their power to amuse. 

The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of 
a joke. Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically 
western, and it is doubtful whether he was more endeared 
to the masses by his solid virtues than by the humorous 
perception which made him one of them. The humor of 
which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and 
national possession. Though America has never, or not 
until lately, had a comic paper ranking with Punch or 
Charivari or the Fliegende Blatter^ every newspaper has 
had its funny column. Our humorists have been graduated 
from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the printing- 
press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has 
risen into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new 
humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's Courier-Journal^ 
or more recently of the Cleveland Plaindealer^ the Danbury 
.Neivs, the Burlington Hawkeye^ the Arkansaw Traveller^ 
the Texas Sif tings, and numerous others. Nowadays there 



Literature Since 1861, 197 

are even syndicates of humorists, who cooperate to supply- 
fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, tlie great 
majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and 
comic almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not 
so certain that the best of the class, like Clemens and 
Browne, will not long continue to be read as illustrative of 
one side of the American mind, or that their best things 
will not survive as long as the mots of Sydney Smith, 
which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of 
them was Seba Smith, who, under the name of "Major 
Jack Downing," did his best to make Jackson's administra- 
tion ridiculous. B. P. Shillaber's "Mrs. Partington "—a 
sort of American Mrs. Malaprop— enjoyed great vogue 
before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the 
"Phoenixiana," 1855, and "Squibob Papers," 1856, of Lieu- 
tenant George H. Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pio- 
neers of literature on the Pacific coast at the time of the 
California gold fever of '49. Derby's proposal for " A New 
System of English Grammar," his satirical account of the 
topographical survey of the two miles of road between San 
Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his jDicture gallery 
made out of the conventional houses, steamboats, rail-cars, 
runaway negroes, and other designs which used to figure in 
the advertising columns of the newspapers, were all very 
ingenious and clever. 

But all these pale before Artemus Ward— "Artemus the 
delicious," as Charles Reade called him — who first secured 
for this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing and 
reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea Big- 
low, an imaginary personage of some sort, under cover of 
whom the author might conceal his own identity, has 
seemed a necessity to our humorists. Artemus Ward was a 
traveling showman who went about the country exhibiting 
a collection of wax "figgers" and whose experiences and 



198 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most 
ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles F. 
Browne, originally of Maine, a printer by trade and after- 
ward a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and 
Cleveland, where his comicalities in the Plaindealer first 
began to attract notice. In 1860 he came to New York and 
joined the staflT of Vanity Fair, a comic weekly of much 
brightness, which ran a short career and perished for want 
of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public lec- 
turer, people who had formed an idea of him from his im- 
personation of the shrewd and vulgar old showman, were 
surprised to find him a gentlemanly-looking young man. 
who came upon the platform in correct evening dress, and 
*' spoke his piece " in a quiet and somewhat mournful man- 
ner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the au- 
dience laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. 
In London, where he delivered his "Lecture on the Mor- 
mons," in 1866, the gravity of his bearing at first imposed 
upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in search of in- 
structive information and. were disappointed at the inade- 
quate nature of the panorama M'hich Browne had had made 
to illustrate his lecture. Occasionally some hitch would oc- 
cur in the machinery of this, and the lecturer would leave 
the rostrum for a few moments to " work the moon " that 
shone upon the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return 
on the ground that he was **a man short" and offering " to 
pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage 
and education who is a good moonist." When it gradually 
dawned upon the British intellect that these and similar 
devices of the lecturer — such as the soft music which he had 
the pianist play at pathetic passages — nay, that the pano- 
rama and even the lecture itself were of a humorous inten- 
tion, the joke began to take, and Artemus's success in Eng- 
land became assured. He was employed as one of the ed- 



Literature Since 1861. 199 

itors of Punch, but died at Southampton in the year follow- 
ing. 

Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced by cacog- 
raphy or bad spelling, but there was genius in the wildly 
erratic way in which he handled even this rather low order 
of humor. It is a curious commentary on the wretchedness 
of our English orthography that the phonetic spelling of a 
word, as for example, wuz for was, should be in itself an oc- 
casion of mirth. Other verbal effects of a different kind 
were among his devices, as in the passage where the seven- 
teen widows of a deceased Mormon offered themselves to 
Artemus. 

"And I said, ' Why is this thus? What is the reason of 
this thusness ? ' They hove a sigh — seventeen sighs of dif- 
ferent size. They said : 

" ' O, soon thou will be gonested away !^ 

" I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I 
wentested. 

" They said, * Doth not like us?' 

"I said, * I doth— I doth.' 

'* I also said, * I hope your intentions are honorable, as I 
am a lone child, my parents being far — far away.' 

" Then they said, ' Wilt not marry us ? ' 

" I said, * O no, it cannot was.' 

" When they cried, * O cruel man ! this is too much ! — O, 
too much! ' I told them that it was on account of the much- 
ness that I declined." 

It is hard to define the difference between the humor of 
one writer and another, or of one nation and another. It 
can be felt and can be illustrated by quoting examples, but 
scarcely described in general terms. It has been said of 
that class of American humorists of which Artemus Ward 
is a representative that their peculiarity consists in extrav- 
agance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these 



200 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



i 



qualities have characterized otlier schools of humor. There 
is the same element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, 
"Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or 
other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little of," as 
in Artemus's truism that " a comic paper ought to publish 
a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes 
us laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor 
in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have 
been better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never 
been born" ; or in his advice, "Always live within your 
income, even if you have to borrow money to do so" ; or, 
again, in his announcement that " Mr. Ward will pay no 
debts of his own contracting." A kind of ludicrous con- 
fusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words, is also 
one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham 
Young, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my 
life" ; or when, having been drafted at several hundred dif- 
ferent places where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, 
he says that if he went on he should soon become a regiment, 
and adds, " I never knew that there was so many of me." 
With this a whimsical understatement and an affectation 
of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to sac- 
rifice " even his wife's relations " on the altar of patriotism ; 
or where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins 
against orthography, he pronounces that "Chaucer was a 
great poet but he couldn't spell," or where he says of the 
feast of raw dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky- 
bocky, "It don't agree with nie. I prefer simpler food." 
On the whole, it may be said of original humor of this kind, 
as of other forms of originality in literature, that the ele- 
ments of it are old, but their combinations are novel. 

Other humorists, like Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings") 
and David R. Locke ("Petroleum V. Nasby"), have used 
bad spelling as a part of their machinery ; while Robert H. 



Literature Since 1861. 201 

Kewell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens (" Mark 
Twain "), and more recently " Bill Nye," though belonging 
to the same school of low or broad comedy, have discarded 
cacography. Of these the most eminent, by all odds, is 
Mark Twain, who has probably made more people laugh 
than any other living waiter. A Missourian by birth (1835), 
he served the usual apprenticeship at type-setting and edit- 
ing country newspapers ; spent seven years as a pilot on a 
Mississippi steamboat, and seven years more mining and 
journalizing in Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia 
City Enterprise : finally drifting to San Francisco, and was 
associated with Bret Harte on the Californian, and in 1867 
published his first book, "The Jumping Frog." This was 
succeeded by the "Innocents Abroad," 1869; " Roughing 
It," 1872 ; "A Tramp Abroad," 1880 ; and by others not so 
good. 

Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of 
innocence and surprise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a 
like suddenness in his turns of expression, as where he 
speaks of "• the calm confidence of a Christian with four 
aces." If he did not originate, he at any rate employed 
very effectively that now familiar device of the newspaper 
"funny man" of putting a painful situation euphemisti- 
cally, as when he says of a man who was hanged that he 
"received injuries which terminated in his death." He 
uses to the full extent the American humorist's favorite re- 
sources of exaggeration and irreverence. An instance of 
the former quality may be seen in his famous description 
of a dog chasing a coyote, in " Roughing It," or in his in- 
terview with the lightning-rod agent in "Mark Twain's 
Sketches," 1875. He is a shrewd observer, and his humor 
has a more satirical side than Artemus Ward's, sometimes 
passing into downright denunciation. He delights partic- 
ularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing 



202 Initial Studies in Americayi Letters. 

cant. He runs atilt, as has been said, at " copy-book texts," 
at the temperance reformer, the tract distributer, the Good 
Boy of Sunday-school hterature, and the women who send 
bouquets and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. 
He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical anecdotes, 
such as the story of George Washington and his little 
hatchet ; burlesques the time-honored adventure, in nautical 
romances, of the starving crew casting lots in the long-boat, 
and spoils the dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, 
saying of a discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, *'He 
wanted fresh shad." The fun of *' Innocents Abroad " con- 
sists in this irreverent application of modern, common 
sense, utilitarian, democratic standards to the memorable 
places and historical associations of Europe. Tried by this 
test the Old Masters in the picture galleries become laugh- 
able, Abelard was a precious scoundrel, and the raptures of 
the guide-books are parodied without mercy. The tourist 
weeps at the grave of Adam. At Genoa he drives the 
cicei'one to despair by pretending never to have heard of 
Christopher Columbus, and inquiring innocently, "Is he 
dead?" It is Europe vulgarized and stripped of its il- 
lusions—Europe seen by a western newspaper reporter 
without any " historic imagination." 

The method of this whole class of humorists is the oppo- 
site of Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not 
amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not 
founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, un- 
expectedness. Everything in life is reversed, as in opera 
bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the 
place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they have 
supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental excesses, 
and the world is in their debt for many a hearty laugh. 

In the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, appeared a 
tale entitled " The Man Without a Country," which made 



Literatare Since 1861. 203 

a great sensation, and did much to strengthen patriotic 
feeling in one of the darkest liours of tlie nation's history. 
It was tlie story of one Pliilip Nolan, an army officer, 
whose liead had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, 
having been censured by a court-martial for some minor 
offense, exclaimed petulantly, upon mention being made of 
the United States government : •* Damn the United States ! 
I wish that I might never hear tbe United States men- 
tioned again." Thereupon he was sentenced to have his 
wish, and was kept all his life aboard the vessels of the 
navy, being sent off on long voyages and transferred from 
ship to ship, with orders to those in charge that his country 
and its concerns should never be spoken of in his presence. 
Such an air of reality was given to the narrative by inci- 
dental references to actual persons and occurrences that 
many believed it true, and some were found who re- 
membered Philip Nolan, but had heard different versions 
of his career. The author of this clever hoax — if hoax it 
may be called — was Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian 
clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of stories 
in 1868, under the fantastic title, "If, Yes, and Perhaps," 
indicating thereby that some of the tales were possible, 
some of them probable, and others might even be regarded 
as essentially true. A similar collection, "His Level Best, 
and Other Stories," was published in 1873, and in the 
interval three volumes of a somewhat different kind, the 
" Ingham Papers " and " Sybaris and Other Homes," both 
in 1869, and " Ten Times One Is Ten," in 1871. The author 
shelters himself behind the imaginary figure of Captain 
Frederic Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian church at 
Naguadavick, and the same characters have a way of re- 
appearing in his successive volumes as old friends of the 
reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a little 
tiresome. 



204 Initial Studies in Amei'ican Letters. 

Mr. Hale is one of the most original and ingenious of 
American story-writers. Tlie old device of making wildly 
improbable inventions appear like fact by a realistic treat- 
ment of details — a device employed by Swift and Edgar 
Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne — became quite fresh 
and novel in his hands, and was managed with a humor 
all his own. Some of his best stories are : " My Double and 
How He Undid Me," describing how a busy clergyman 
found an Irishman who looked so much like himself that 
he trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do 
duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby 
escaping bores and getting time for real work ; " The Brick 
Moon," a story of a projectile built and launched into 
space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the earth and 
serve mariners as a mark of longitude ; "The Rag Man and 
Rag Woman," a tale of an impoverished couple who made 
a competence by saving the pamphlets, advertisements, 
wedding-cards, etc., that came to them through the mail, 
and developing a paper business on that basis; and "The 
Skeleton in the Closet," which shows how the fate of the 
Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a 
certain hoop-skirt, "built in the eclipse and rigged with 
curses dark." Mr. Hale's historical scholarship and his 
habit of detail have aided him in the art of giving vi^aisem- 
blance to absurdities. He is known in philanthropy as 
well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy, prac- 
tical way with them in consonance with his motto, " Look 
up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and 
not in, and lend a hand." 

It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last 
quarter of a century. The writers who have given it shape 
are still writing, and their work is therefore incomplete. 
But on the slightest review of it two facts become manifest : 
first, that New England has lost its long monopolj^ ; and, 



Literature Since 1861. 205 

secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the growth 
of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere 
for thirty years preceding the Civil War, the storm and 
stress of great public contests, and the intellectual stir pro- 
duced by transcendentalism seem to have been more favor- 
able to poetry and literary idealism than present conditions 
are. At all events, there are no new poets who rank with 
Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of the elder gen- 
oration, although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. 
Stoddard and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Al- 
drich, first in New York and afterward in Boston, have 
written creditable verse ; not to speak of younger writers, 
whose work, however, for the most part, has been more 
distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native im- 
pulse. Mention has been made of the establishment of 
Harper'' s Monthly Magazine, which, under the conduct of 
its accomplished editors, has provided the public with an 
abundance of good reading. The old Putnam'' 8 Monthly, 
which ran from 1853 to 1858, and had a strong corps of 
contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued by 
that name till 1870, when it was succeeded by Scribncrls 
Monthly, under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and 
this in 1881 by The Century, an efficient rival of Harper^ s 
in circulation, in literary excellence, and in the beauty of 
its wood-engravings, the American school of which art 
these two great periodicals have done much to develop and 
encourage. Another New York monthly, The Galaxy, ran 
from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant White. 
Within the last few years a new Scrihner^s Magazine has 
also taken the field. The Atlantic, in Boston, and Lippin- 
cotVs, in Philadelphia, are no unworthy competitors with 
these for public favor. 

During the forties began a new era of national exi^ansion, 
somewhat resembling that described in a former chapter, 



206 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and, like that, bearing fruit eventually in literature. The 
admission of Florida as a state in 1845, and the annexation 
of Texas in the same year, were followed hj the cession of 
California in 1848, and its admission as a state in 1850. In 
1849 came the great rush to the California gold-fields. San 
Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board shan- 
ties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity 
into a great city— the wicked and wonderful city apostro- 
phized by Bret Harte in his poem, *' San Francisco ": 

•* Serene, indifferent of fate, 
Thou sittest at the Western Gate ; 
Upon thy heights so lately won 
Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . 
I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
Thy hard, high lust and wilful deed." 

The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the 
Pacific coast found there a motley state of society between 
civilization and savagery. There were the relics of the old 
Mexican occupation, the Spanish missions, with their Chris- 
tianized Indians ; the wild tribes of the plains — Apaches, 
Utes, and Navajoes ; the Chinese coolies and washermen — 
all elements strange to the Atlantic seaboard and the states 
of the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or cara- 
vans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted Avitli sage- 
brush and seamed by deep canons, and passes through 
gigantic mountain ranges. On the coast itself nature was 
unfamiliar : the climate was subtropical ; fruits and vegeta- 
bles grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the enor- 
mous redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious 
scale of the scenery in the vallej^ of the Yosemite and the 
snowcapped peaks of the sierras. At first there were few 
women, and the men led a wild, lawless existence in the 
mining camps. Hard upon tlie heels of the prospector fol- 
lowed the dram-shop, the gambling-hell, and the dance- 
hall. Every naan carried his '' Colt," and looked out for 



Literature Since 1861. 207 



his own life and his " claim." Crime went unpunished or 
was taken in hand, when it got too rampant, by vigilance 
committees. In the diggings shaggy frontiersmen and 
" Pikes " from Missouri mingled with the scum of eastern 
cities and with broken-down business men and young col- 
lege graduates seeking their fortune. Surveyors and geolo- 
gists came of necessity ; speculators in mining stock and 
city lots set up their offices in the town ; later came a 
sprinkling of school-teachers and ministers. Fortunes were 
made in one day and lost the next at poker or loo. To-day 
the lucky miner who had struck a good " lead '' was drink- 
ing champagne out of pails and treating the town ; to-mor- 
row he was " busted," and shouldered the pick for a new 
onslaught upon his luck. This strange, reckless life was 
not without fascination, and highly picturesque and dra- 
matic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret Harte 
says, *' an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry," 
and sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. 

During the w^ar California remained loyal to the Union, 
but was too far from the seat of conflict to experience 
any serious disturbance, and went on independently de- 
veloping its own resources and becoming daily more civil- 
ized. By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, The 
Overland Monthly, which ran until 1875, and was revived in 
1883. It had a decided local flavor, and the vignette on its 
title-page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a 
grizzly bear crossing a railway track. In an early number 
of the Overland was a story entitled " The Luck of Koaring 
Camp," by Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, N. Y. 
(1835), who had come to California at the age of seventeen, 
in time to catch the unique aspects of the life of the forty- 
niners, before their vagabond communities had settled down 
into the law-abiding society of the present day. His first 
contribution was followed by other stories and sketclies of a 



208 Initial Studies in Ameyncan Letters. 

similar kind, such as " The Outcasts of Poker Flat," "Hig- 
gles," and " Tennessee's Partner " ; and by verses, serious 
and humorous, of which last, " Plain Language from Truth- 
ful James," better known as " The Heathen Chinee," made 
an immediate hit, and carried its author's name into every 
corner of the English-speaking world. In 1871 he published 
a collection of his tales, another of his poems, and a volume 
of very clever parodies, "Condensed Novels," which rank 
with Thackeray's " Novels by Eminent Hands." 

Bret Harte's California stories were vivid, highly colored 
pictures of life in the mining camps and raw towns of the 
Pacific coast. The pathetic and the grotesque went hand in 
hand in them, and the author aimed to show how even in 
the desperate characters gathered together there — the for- 
tune-hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and 
prostitutes — the latent nobility of human nature asserted 
itself in acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and 
touching fidelity. The same men who cheated at cards and 
shot each other down with tipsy curses were capable on 
occasion of the most romantic generosity and the most deli- 
cate chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in 
the matter of dialect and manners and other details, the 
narrator was not true to the facts. This was a comparatively 
unimportant charge ; but a more serious question was the 
doubt whether his characters were essentially true to human 
nature ; whether the wild soil of revenge and greed and 
dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as blos- 
som in " Tennessee's Partner "and *' The Outcasts of Poker 
Flat." However this may be, there is no question as to 
Harte's power as a narrator. His short stories are skilfully 
constructed and eflfectively told. They never drag, and are 
never overladen with description, reflection, or other lum- 
ber. 

In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types 



Literature Since 1861. 209 

and nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast : the httle 
Mexican maiden, Pachita, in tlie old mission garden ; the 
wicked Bill Nye, who tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at 
euchre and to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery ticket ; 
the geological society on the Stanislaw who settle their 
scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and the 
skulls of mammoths ; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally 
strikes gold while digging a well, and builds a house with 
a " coopilow " ; and Flynn, of Virginia, who saves his 
" pard's " life at the sacrifice of his own, by holding up the 
timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly in 
monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory 
and abrupt in style, and with a good deal of indicated action, 
as in "Jim," where a miner comes into a bar-room, looking 
for his old chum, learns that he is dead, and is just turning 
away to hide his emotion when he recognizes Jim in his 
informant. 

*' Well, thar— Good-bye- 
No more, sir — I — 

Eh? 
What's that you say ? — 
Why, dern it!— sho ! — 
No? Yes! By Jo! 

Sold! 
Sold ! Why, you limb ! 
You ornery, 

Derned old 
Long-legged Jim ! " 

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our 
newspaper poetry for a number of years abound in the prop- 
erties of Californian life, such as gulches, placers, divides, 
etc., but writers farther east applied his method to other 
conditions. Of these by far the most successful was John 
Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President 
Lincoln, whose "Little Breeches," "Jim Bludso," and 
" M^^stery of Gilgal " have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses 



210 Initial Studies in Ametnean Letter's. 

in popularity. In the last named piece the reader is given 
to feel that there is something rather cheerful and humorous 
in a bar-room fight which results in ** the gals that winter, 
as a rule," going ''alone to singing-school." In the two 
former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same 
combination of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty 
and tenderness. The profane farmer of the Southwest, who 
"doesn't pan out on the prophets," and who had taught 
his little son " to chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk teeth 
white," but who believes in God and the angels ever since 
the miraculous recovery of tlie same little son when lost on 
the prairie in a blizzard ; and the unsaintly and bigamistic 
captain of the Prairie Belle^ who died like a hero, hold- 
ing the nozzle of his burning boat against the bank 

•' Till the last galoot's ashore." 

The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of 
the country have received abundant illustration of late 
years. Edward Eggleston's " Hoosier Schoolmaster," 1871, 
and his other novels are pictures of rural life in the early 
days of Indiana. " Western Windows," a volume of poems 
by John James Piatt, also a native of Indiana, had an un- 
mistakable local coloring. 

Another Indiana poet, James Whitcomb Eiley, has re- 
cently attained the rank of a really national poet. His 
books sell by the hundred thousand, and his popularity 
equals, if it does not exceed, that of the favorite Longfellow. 
The contents of his first volume of poems in the Hoosier 
dialect, " The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More 
Poems," 1883, had originally appeared in the Indianapolis 
Journal, and purported to be the contributions of Benj. F. 
Johnson, a simple-hearted old Boone County farmer. This 
quaint and friendly figure had an individuality as taking 
as that of those other literary myths, Diedrich Knicker- 



Literature Since 1861. 211 

bocker, Hosea Biglow, and Artemus Ward, without the 
touch of caricature which made them all slightly unreal. 
"Here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the thing 
itself." The creator of Hosea Biglow lived to extend a 
warm welcome to his youngest successor in the art of 
homely idyllic verse ; and the venerable Dr. Holmes was 
more interested in these Hoosier ballads than in any other 
recent phenomenon in American literature. 

Such poems as " Griggsby's Station," " The Airly Days," 
and "When the Frost is on the Punkin," with their abso- 
lute sincerity and their mixture of tenderness and humor, 
went straight to the heart of the people. They appealed to 
country neighbors, and to all who had ever been country 
boys and played hookey to go swimming, or fishing, or bird- 
nesting, or stealing watermelons, or simply lying on the 
orchard grass. There is an artless, catching sing-song in 
Riley's meters which makes them a kind of glorified 
Mother Goose Melodies. Pieces like " Little Ori^hant 
Annie " and " The Raggedy Man " are as singable as Foster's 
plantation songs and as poetic, in their interpretation of the 
childish mind, as Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses." 
This union of lyric imagination with the lilt of the familiar 
nursery rhyme may be illustrated from a single stanza. 

" An' little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue, 
An' the lampwick spatters, an' the wind goes woo-oo ! 
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray, 
An' the lightnin'-bugs in dew is all squenched away, — 
You better mind yer parents, an' yer teachers fond and dear, 
An' churish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear. 
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about, 
Er the gobble-uns '11 git you 

Ef you 

Don't 

Watch 

Out!" 

Riley's first volume has been followed by many others : 



212 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

"Neighborly Poems, " Afterwhlles," "Pipes O'Pan," 
"Rhymes of Childhood," etc. In 1892 a selection of his 
poems was published in England with the title "Old- 
Fashioned Roses." Although his pieces in dialect have 
winning peculiarities, all their own, many of his verses in 
classical English, such as " The South Wind and the Sun " 
and " Afterwhiles," show that his poetry is not dependent 
upon dialect for its highest effects. 

Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in his Hans Breit- 
mann ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of 
the German-American element in the cities. By the death, 
in 1881, of Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, the South 
lost a poet of rare promise, whose original genius was some- 
what hampered by his hesitation between two arts of ex- 
pression, music and verse, and by his effort to coordinate 
them. His "Science of English Verse," 1880, was a most 
suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that 
theory of their relation which he was worliing out in his 
practice. Some of his pieces, like "The Mocliing Bird" 
and the " Song of the Chattahoociiie," are the most charac- 
teristically southern poetry that has been written in 
America. Joel Chandler Harris's " Uncle Remus" stories, 
in negro dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the 
plantation, while his collection of stories, "At Teague 
Poteet's," together with Miss Murfree's " In the Tennessee 
Mountains" and her other books, have made the northern 
public familiar with the wild life of the "moonshiners," 
who distil illicit whisky in the mountains of Georgia, 
North Carohna, and Tennessee. These tales are not only 
exciting in incident, but strong and fresli in their delinea- 
tions of character. Their descriptions of mountain scenery 
are also impressive, though, in the case of the last-named 
writer, frequently too prolonged. 

George W. Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New 



Literature Since 1861. 213 

Orleans attracted attention by their freshness and quaintuess 
when published in the magazines and reissued in book form 
as "Old Creole Days," in 1879. His first regular novel, 
"The Grandissimes," 1880, was likewise a story of Creole 
life. It had the same winning qualities as his short stories 
and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic 
force, especially in the intensely tragic and jDowerfully told 
episode of "Bras Coup6." Mr. Cable has continued his 
studies of Louisiana types and ways in his later books, but 
" The Grandissimes " still remains his masterpiece. All in 
all, he is, thus far, the most important literary figure of the 
New South, and the justness and delicacy of his representa- 
tions of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining 
agency of the Civil War in the states whose " cause" was 
"lost," but whose true interests gained even more by the 
loss than did the interests of the victorious North. 

The four writers last mentioned have all come to the front 
within the past fifteen years, and, in accordance with the 
plan of this sketch, receive here a mere passing notice. It 
remains to close our review of the literary history of the 
period since the war with a somewhat more extended ac- 
count of the two favorite novelists whose work has done 
more than anything else to shape the movement of recent 
fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean 
Howells. Their writings, though dissimilar in some re- 
spects, are alike in this, that they are analytic in method 
and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and 
simple ; he wrote the romance of adventure and of external 
incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, and with a finer 
spiritual insight dealt with the real passions of the heart 
and with men's inner experiences. This he did with truth 
and power ; but, although himself a keen observer of what- 
ever passed before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a 
photographic fidelity to the surface facts of speech, dress, 



214 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and manners. Thus the talk of his characters is book-talk, 
and not the actual language of the parlor or the street, with 
its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and shad- 
ings of phrase and pronunciation which mark different 
sections of the country and different grades of society. His 
attempts at dialect, for example, were of the slenderest kind. 
His art is ideal, and his romances certainly do not rank as 
novels of real life. But with the growth of a richer and 
more complicated society in America, fiction has grown 
more social and more minute in its observation. 

It would not be fair to classify the novels of James and 
Howells as the fiction of manners merely ; they are also the 
fiction of character, but they aim to describe people not 
only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also as they 
look and talk and dress. They try to express character 
through manners, Avhich is the way in which it is most 
often expressed in the daily existence of a conventional so- 
ciety. It is a principle of realism not to select exceptional 
persons or occurrences, but to take average men and women 
and their average experiences. The realists protest that the 
moving incident is not their trade, and that the stories have 
all been told. They want no plot and no hero. They will 
tell no rounded tale with a denouement, in which all the 
parts are distributed, as in the fifth act of an old-fashioned 
comedy ; but they will take a transcript from life and end 
when they get through, without informing the reader what 
becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest 
this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." 
Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Tur- 
g6nieff, and Anthony Trollope, and they regard novels as 
studies in sociology, honest reports of the writers' impres- 
sions, which may not be without a certain scientific value 
even. 

Mr. James's peculiai* province is the international novel, 



Literature Since 1861. 215 

a field which he created for himself, but which he has occu- 
pied in company with Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many 
others. The novelist received most of his schooling in 
Europe, and has lived much abroad, with the result that he 
has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmo- 
politan Indiflierence upon his Yankee inheritance. This, 
indeed, has constituted his opportunity. A close observer 
and a conscientious student of the literary art, he has added 
to his intellectual equipment the advantage of a curious 
doubleness in his point of view. He looks at America with 
the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an 
American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation 
with American life that he describes a Boston horse-car or 
a New York hotel table with a sort of amused wonder. His 
starting-point was in criticism, and he has always main- 
tained the critical attitude. He took up story-writing in 
order to help himself, by practical experiment, in his chosen 
art of literary criticism, and his volume on "French Poets 
and Novelists," 1878, is by no means the least valuable of his 
books. His short stories in the magazines were collected in- 
to a volume in 1875, with the title, "A Passionate Pilgrim, 
and Other Stories." One or two of these, as " The Last of 
theValerii" and "The Madonna of the Future," suggest 
Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom James 
afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" 
series. But in the name-story of the collection he was al- 
ready in the line of his future development. This is the 
story of a middle-aged invalid American who comes to Eng- 
land in search of health, and finds, too late, in the mellow 
atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the con- 
genial surroundings which he has all his life been longing 
for in his raw America. The pathos of his self-analysis and 
his confession of failure is subtly imagined. The impres- 
sions which he and his far-away English kinsfolk make on 



216 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

one another, their mutual attraction and repulsion, are de- 
scribed with that delicate perception of national differences 
which makes the humor and sometimes the tragedy of 
James's later books, like "The American," "Daisy Mil- 
ler," "The Europeans," and "An International Episode." 
His first novel was "Roderick Hudson," 1876, not the 
most characteristic of his fictions, but perhaps the most 
powerful in its grasp of elementary passion. The analytic 
method and the critical attitude have their dangers in im- 
aginative literature. In proportion as this writer's faculty 
of minute observation and his realistic objectivity have in- 
creased upon him, the uncomfortable coldness which is felt 
in his youthful work has become actually disagreeable, and 
his art — growing constantly finer and surer in matters of 
detail — has seemed to dwell more and more in the region of 
mere manners and less in the higher realm of character and 
passion. In most of his writings the heart, somehow, is 
left out. We have seen that Irving, from his knowledge of 
England and America, and his long residence in both coun- 
tries, became the mediator between the two great branches 
of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of his 
sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise inter- 
preted the two nations to one another in a subtler but less 
genial fashion than Irving, and not through sympathy, but 
through contrast, by bringing into relief the opposing ideals 
of life and society which have develojDed under different in- 
stitutions. In his novel, "The American," 1877, he has 
shown the actual misery which may result from the clash- 
ing of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as 
"Daisy Miller," 1879, " The Pension Beaurepas," and "A 
Bundle of Letters," he has exhibited types of the American 
»girl, the American business man, the aesthetic feebling from 
Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized 
American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth 



Literature Since 1861. 217 



the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunder- 
standings which result from contradictory standards of con- 
ventional morality and behavior. In "The Europeans," 
1879, *'Lady Barbarina," and "An International Episode," 
1888, he has reversed the process, bringing Old World stand- 
ards to the test of American ideas by transferring his dram- 
atis personcE to republican soil. The last named of these il- 
lustrates how slender a plot realism requires for its purposes. 
It is nothing more than the history of an English girl of 
good family who marries an American gentleman and un- 
dertakes to live in America, but finds herself so uncomfort- 
able in strange social conditions that she returns to Eng- 
land for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's sister is so 
taken with the freedom of these very conditions that she 
elopes with another American and " goes West." James is 
a keen observer of the physiognomy of cities as well as of 
men, and his "Portraits of Places," 1884, is among the 
most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign 
travel. 

Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international " 
touches. In "A Foregone Conclusion" and "The Lady of 
the Aroostook," and others of his novels, the contrasted 
points of view in American and European life are intro- 
duced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom, 
and dialect, which make the modern Englishman and 
the modern American such objects of curiosity to each 
other, and which have been dwelt upon of late even unto 
satiety. But in general he finds his subjects at home, and 
if he does not know his own countrymen and country- 
women more intimately than Mr. James, at least he loves 
them better. There is a warmer sentiment in his fictions, 
too ; his men are better fellows and his women are more 
lovable. Howell s was born in Ohio. His early life was 
that of a western country editor. In 1860 he published, 



218 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

jointly with his friend Piatt, a book of verse — "Poems of 
Two Friends." In 1861 he was sent as consul to Venice, 
and the literary results of his sojourn there appeared in his 
sketches, "Venetian Life," 1865, and "Italian Journeys," 
1867. In 1871 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly^ 
and in the same year published his " Suburban Sketches." 
All of these early volumes showed a quick eye for the pic- 
turesque, an unusual power of description, and humor of 
the most delicate quality ; but as yet there was little ap- 
proach to narrative. "Their Wedding Journey" was a 
revelation to the public of the interest that may lie in an 
ordinary bridal trij) across the state of New York, when a 
close and sympathetic observation is brought to bear upon 
the characteristics of American life as it appears at railway 
stations and hotels, on steamboats and in the streets of very 
commonplace towns. "A Chance Acquaintance," 1873, was 
Howells's first novel, though even yet the story was set 
against a background of travel-pictures. A holiday trip 
on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, with descriptions 
of Quebec and the Falls of Montmorenci, rather predomi- 
nated over the narrative. Thus, gradually and by a natural 
process, complete characters and realistic novels, such as 
" A Modern Instance," 1882, and " Indian Summer," 
evolved themselves from truthful sketches of places and 
persons seen by the way. 

The incompatibility existing between European and 
American views of life, which makes the comedy or the 
tragedy of Henry James's international fictions, is replaced 
in Howells's novels by the repulsion between differing 
social grades in the same country. The adjustment of these 
subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life in all 
complicated societies. Thus in "A Chance Acquaintance" 
the heroine is a bright and pretty western girl, who be- 
comes engaged during a pleasure tour to an irreproachable 



Literature Since 1861. 219 

but offensively priggish yoiiug gentlemau from Boston, and 
the engagement is broken by her in consequence of an un- 
intended sliglit — the betrayal on the hero's part of a shade 
of mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly 
brought into the presence of some fashionable ladies belong- 
ing to his own monde. The little comedy, "Out of the 
Question," deals with this same adjustment of social 
scales ; and in many of Howells's other novels, such as 
"Silas Lapham" and " The Lady of the Aroostook," one 
of the main motives may be described to be the contact of 
the man who eats with his fork with the man who eats 
with his knife, and the shock thereby ensuing. In " Indian 
Summer" the complications arise from the difference in 
age between the hero and heroine, and not from a differ- 
ence in station or social antecedents. In all of these fic- 
tions the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility 
of manners rather than of character, and, if anything 
were to be objected to the probability of the story, it is that 
the climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties which, in 
real life, when there is opportunity for explanations, are 
readily brushed aside. But in "A Modern Instance" 
Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In this, his 
strongest work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in 
George Eliot's great novels, by the reaction of characters 
upon one another, and the story is realistic in a higher 
sense than any mere study of manners can be. 

His nearest approach to romance is in " The Undiscovered 
Country," 1880, which deals with the Spiritualists and the 
Shakers, and in its study of problems that hover on the 
borders of the supernatural, in its out-of-the-way personages 
and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic flavor about the 
whole book, has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne, es- 
pecially to Hawthorne in "The Blithedale Romance," 
where he comes closer to common ground with other ro- 



220 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

mancers. It is interesting to compare " The Undiscovered 
Country" with Henry James's *' Bostonians," tlie latest 
and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a 
study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights advo- 
cates, and all varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of 
"causes," for w^hom Boston has long been notorious. A 
most unlovely race of people they become under the cold 
scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which see more 
clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken 
fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous 
intensity, and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of 
the humanitarians, than the nobility and moral enthusiasm 
which underlie the surface. 

Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist 
whose plays are also literature. His field is parlor comedy. 
His little farces, "The Elevator," "The Register," "The 
Parlor-Car," have a lightness and grace, with an exqui- 
sitely absurd situation, w^hich remind us more of the 
"Comedies et Proverbes " of Alfred de Musset, or the many 
agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic 
stage, than of any work of English or American hands. His 
softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways 
is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly 
illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has 
perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray 
calls "that great discovery," Mrs. Nickleby. 



1. Theodore Winthrop : "Life in the Open Air"; 
" Cecil Dreeme." 

2. Thomas Went worth Higginson : " Life in a Black 
Regiment." 

3. " Poetry of the Civil War." Edited by Richard Grant 
White. New York : 1866. 

4. Charles Farrar Browne : " Art emus Ward— His 



Literature Since 1861. 221 

Book " ; " Lecture on the Mormons " ; " Artemus Ward in 
London." 

5. Samuel, Langhorne Clemens : " The Jumping 
Frog " ; " Roughing It" ; " The Mississippi Pilot." 

6. Charles Godfrey Leland : " Hans Breitmann's 
Ballads." 

7. Edward Everett Hale : "If, Yes, and Perhaps " ; 
" His Level Best, and Other Stories." 

8. Francis Bret Harte : " Outcasts of Poker Flat, and 
Other Stories"; "Condensed Novels"; "Poems in Dia- 
lect." 

9. Sidney Lanier : " Nirvana " ; " Resurrection "; "The 
Harlequin of Dreams"; "Song of the Chattahoochie " ; 
"The Mocking Bird"; " The Stirrup-Cup " ; "Tampa 
Robins"; "The Bee"; "The Revenge of Hamish"; 
" The Ship of Earth " ; " The Marshes of Glynn " ; " Sun- 
rise." 

10. Henry James, Jr. : "A Passionate Pilgrim " ; " Rod- 
erick Hudson " ; "Daisy Miller" ; "Pension Beaurepas " ; 
"A Bundle of Letters " ; "An International Episode"; 
"The Bostonians " ; " Portraits of Places." 

11. William Dean Ho wells : " Their Wedding Jour- 
ney " ; " Suburban Sketches " ; " A Chance Acquaintance "; 
" A Foregone Conclusion " ; " The Undiscovered Country"; 
"A Modern Instance." 

12. George W. Cable : " Old Creole Days " ; " Madame 
Delphine" ; " The Grandissimes." 

13. Joel Chandler Harris : " Uncle Remus " ; " Min- 
go, and Other Sketches." 

14. Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree) : "In 
the Tennessee Mountains." 

15. James Whitcomb Riley : " Neighborly Poems " ; 
"Afterwhiles " ; " Rhymes of Childhood." 



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